Tags: Asus, AVerMedia, Creatix, Europe, Medion, NXP SAA7231, NXP Semiconductors, PCI, PCIe, PCTV, Pegatron, Philips, SAA7231

World’s Smallest Hybrid PCTV Solution Minimizes BoM and Power Consumption, Delivers Ubiquitous TV Viewing Experience

NXP Semiconductors, the independent semiconductor company founded by Philips, today announced that its family of hybrid PCTV solutions – SAA7231 – is the preferred choice of leading consumer technology manufacturers, including ASUS, AVerMedia, Creatix, Medion and Pegatron. Each of these companies is delivering NXP-based PCTV products, including portable computers, laptops, living room PCs and PCTV cards.

As small as half a mini-Express Card form-factor, the NXP SAA7231 is a single-chip hybrid solution that supports worldwide broadcast standards, making it ideal for manufacturers seeking to target different geographical markets with PCTV-enabled products. The SAA7231 family of PCTV solutions includes 12 variants to suit a variety of manufacturer use cases to offer the maximum flexibility in design and integration.

Incorporating a channel decoder for DVB-S/T, a video decoder for all analog standards, a stereo audio broadcast decoder with stereo base band inputs, and a PCI/PCIe interface, the NXP SAA7231 family offers industry-leading integration, enabling developers to achieve significant design and bills-of-material (BOM) cost reduction. Sophisticated power management capabilities ensure ultra-low power consumption for uninterrupted streaming of AV content, enabling extended playback time on portable devices.

“As consumers are desirous of staying tuned to live TV beyond the confines of the living room, watching TV on a PC is fast becoming a new viewing habit - rapidly overtaking other alternatives for entertainment,” said Yung-Chien Li, analyst at Topology Research Institute. “Affordability, high quality, low power and multi-standard compliance are essentials for consumers to enjoy the PCTV viewing experience, and NXP’s SAA7231 family of solutions allows manufacturers to offer these benefits on their devices.”

“The SAA7231 solution family supports all the analog standards and DVB-S/T, which are the most widely adopted digital broadcast standards in the world, and can be easily extended for ISDB and ATSC compliance with reserved interfaces,” said Martin Maloney, marketing director for PC systems, Home business unit, NXP Semiconductors. “Driving the creation of consumer multimedia technology, where all kinds of content can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime with great picture and sound quality is a key aspect of the NXP ethos – these technologies represent the next phase in that development.”

The NXP SAA7231 family features a full-function built-in MCE compliance IR and can achieve reception/transmission/learning/wake-up without any external hardware. This will benefit manufacturers with a further cost saving of more than US$ 5.00 from PC system point of view.

“As a leading PC and laptop supplier, we are very excited about the changing consumer habits of viewing TV outside the living room and on personal computers,” said Chih-Peng Wu, A.V.P. of ASUS. “By adopting NXP’s advanced and cost effective SAA7231 PCTV solution family, we are able to feed this expanding market with rich PCTV features in laptops.”

“As a world leading PCTV card manufacturer, we need to develop different products for different markets to meet different demands, which can be challenging,” said Allan Yang, President of AVerMedia. “NXP SAA7231 solution provides us a single platform to cover all major TV broadcast standards, maximizing the investment and cost effectiveness of our PCTV portfolio.”

“NXP’s SAA7231 is helping us redefine the TV viewing landscape for consumers, bringing affordable PCTV reception to portable devices around the world,” said Roland Weller, managing director of Creatix.

“The fast digitalization of the European as well as worldwide TV industry has made standard compliance a critical factor for the success of our PCTV offerings,” said Christian Eigen, CFO, MEDION AG. “By leveraging NXP SAA7231 single-chip solution that supports DVB-S/T standards, we are able to cater to the booming European market.”

“As a leading DMS (Design, Manufacturing and Service) company, it is very important for Pegatron to ensure high production turnaround to differentiate us from other OEMs,” said Hawk Hsu, product manager at Pegatron. “Based on a simple platform with high integration, the NXP SAA7231 solution family is an ideal choice for us to ensure high yield of PCTV products manufacturing for better customer satisfaction.”

About NXP Semiconductors

NXP is a top 10 semiconductor company founded by Philips more than 50 years ago. Headquartered in Europe, the company has 37,000 employees working in more than 20 countries and posted sales of USD6.3 billion in 2007. NXP creates semiconductors, system solutions and software that deliver better sensory experiences in mobile phones, personal media players, TVs, set-top boxes, identification applications, cars and a wide range of other electronic devices. News from NXP is located at www.nxp.com.

Forward-looking Statements

This release may contain certain forward-looking statements with respect to the financial condition, results of operations and business of NXP and certain plans and objectives of NXP with respect to these items. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future and there are many factors that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements.

Contacts

NXP Semiconductors
Carlo van Pelt, +31 40 27 22075 (Europe)
carlo.van.pelt {at} nxp(.)com
Mark Chisholm, +65 6882 5092 (APAC)
mark.chisholm {at} nxp(.)com
Esther Chang, +886 2 8170 9990 (Greater China)
esther.chang {at} nxp(.)com
Rebecca Samuel, +1-408-474-8769 (USA)
rebecca.samuel {at} nxp(.)com