By Kim Yoo-chul
Staff Reporter
Samsung Electronics has fueling its moves to diversify its businesses from its hitherto high dependence on memory chips.
On Friday, Samsung said it has designed the industry’s first digital TV receiver chip based on 65-nanometer processing technology, enabling digital TVs targeting Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia to receive both vestigial sideband (VSB) broadcasts and quadrature amplitude modulation (QSM) cable signals.
Samsung said the new chip will be used for digital TVs, set-top boxes, TV receiver cards for personal computers, USB interfaced plug-and play dongles or boxes and even DVD recorders.
The chip, which fully supports Europe’s NorDig unified standard for digital broadcasting, reduces the channel scanning interval by half, to less than 0.1 second from the conventional 0.2 second, according to Samsung officials.
Moreover, power consumption for the chip is the industry’s lowest at 80-megawatt, about 30 percent of the existing 250-megawatt average power consumption of current solutions.
NorDig is an association of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden which has developed a ``common strategy’’ for digital terrestrial TVs.
``The cost-effective and advanced solution is a reflection of rising demand for digital-related services and a make-up strategy to raise the stakes in the TV market,’’ said Wong Wi-wan, vice president of Samsung Electronics’ System LSI division.
The chip, which will be available during the first quarter of 2008, will be displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to be held in Las Vegas in January.
The news came seven months after the company developed the receiver chip using the same 65-nanometer technology for TVs in the U.S. and local markets.
According to DisplaySearch, a Texas-based market research firm, the global demand for digital TVs will rise to 153 million by 2011 from 73 million in 2006 with an annual growth rate of 20 percent.