Zarlink Semiconductor has announced the immediate availability of a flexible RF (radio frequency) silicon tuner chip that delivers very high levels of performance and reliability to both analog and digital terrestrial television STBs, while significantly reducing cost and board space.

An official release informs that Zarlink's innovative SL2610 is the industry's first tuner chip that allows low-cost, compact, single-conversion tuner designs to achieve the same high levels of performance as larger, more expensive double-conversion tuners. The SL2610 was designed in consultation with a major US television and STB manufacturer to deliver quality RF tuner performance in the most challenging reception conditions.

Designers of mass market terrestrial STBs are demanding flexible, low-cost tuner chips that can reliably convert analog and digital terrestrial TV (DTTV) signals into clear, crisp pictures. Until now, designers have used double-conversion tuners - which use two steps to convert incoming RF signals to lower-frequency, single-channel outputs - to achieve high-quality reception of DTTV channels. Zarlink's SL2610 allows STB designers to achieve high performance, reliable analog and digital TV reception using a single frequency conversion step.

The SL2610 also claims to be the industry's first single-conversion tuner device with on-chip image channel reject to eliminate unwanted "image channels." This image reject feature, coupled with the SL2610's sophisticated handling of high- amplitude input signals, eliminates the need for costly, complex, specially aligned front-end tracking filters in many applications. As a result, customers can integrate their tuner designs directly on STB motherboards, instead of placing them on dedicated RF boards.

Image reject is required to eliminate undesired image channels that are picked up by tuners while receiving desired channels. The unique image reject circuitry in Zarlink's SL2610 delivers more than 30 dB (decibels) of image suppression. When coupled with a simple, non-aligned tracking filter, the chip easily delivers the performance required for operation in Europe and other countries that have adopted ETSI's (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial) standard for DTTV.

The SL2610 also delivers high-performance intermodulation intercept. This enables the device to efficiently tune to the desired channel in the presence of higher amplitude interferers or wide-bandwidth composite input signals.



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