CMOS tuners for mobile TV

Digital video reception is emerging as the latest feature toward multimedia-enriched handheld devices. Mobile battery-operated devices require small-size tuners that consume low power and are amenable to single-chip integration with the baseband demodulator. Following an overview of the system and circuit-level implementation challenges of mobile TV standards such as DVB-H and T-DMB, this article presents a dual-band direct conversion tuner for DVB-H. Architecture and circuit trade-offs are discussed, and detailed measurements are presented. The tuner occupies 9.7 mm
²
and achieves a 4 dB NF at both UHF and L-band, eliminating the need for an external LNA. By using a fractional-TV synthesizer both 470-890 MHz and 1.4-1.8 GHz bands are supported, while achieving an integrated phase noise of less than -41 dBc. Sixth-order low-pass filters support channel bandwidths from 4 to 10 MHz