US tuner chip designer Microtune is warning that TV on mobile phones could be vulnerable to interference from text messages and emails, causing drop out and poor picture quality.

It has been used in handsets for the DVB-H mobile TV service in Italy and says that there is a significant risk that the lower TV signals will be swamped by the phone polling the network and SMS messages.

“Dynamic sensitivity is critical,” said Paul Spruce, handheld marketing manager at the Plano-Texas based company. “With a GSM carrier switch-on the sensitivity collapses by 22dB because the low noise amplifier is saturated. That's going to be a significant issue and one of the reasons why we have been successful with our ClearTune technology is this GSM immunity.”

The company is concentrating on the system-in-package approach, and is not planning to develop a single chip tuner demodulator, he says. He also still would not comment on the timescales for it's multi-standard tuner, which it started development on six months ago.

Meanwhile UK-based chi designer Frontier Silicon has raised £16m for its single chip mobile TV design.

“We have over 100 engineers in the UK and Ireland developing the next generation chips for mobile TV,” said Anthony Sethill, CEO of Frontier. “It's a really expensive business once you start going into complex embedded radio designs at 90nm and 65nm but that's what we have to do. In five years time it will be a standard feature on phones but to do that you have to invest heavily.”

The round was led by new investor Mitsui Private Equity of Japan with new investors Cheyne Capital Management and Plutus Capital Management, alongside existing funder who include Apax Partners and Alta Berkeley.

Microtune