Technical Analysis and Application of Silicon Tuner

Technical Analysis and Application of Silicon Tuner

Central issues:

• Introduction of silicon tuner

• Basic working principle of the tuner

• Technical analysis of silicon tuner

solution:

• Adopt commonly used CMOS process

• Using digital processing technology to change its characteristics through the programming of the control port

Generally, information is transmitted by electrical signals at a short distance, and the baseband signal can be directly transmitted, but at a long distance, the baseband signal must be modulated onto the radio frequency signal, that is, the low-frequency signal spectrum is moved to the high-frequency spectrum. The receiving end must demodulate the baseband signal from the modulated signal, that is, move the useful signal from the high frequency signal to the low frequency. At the same time, the receiver often receives many signals, and we also need to choose the signal we need. The device that needs to complete the selection of signals and signal spectrum to move low is the tuner (in the analog TV era, the tuner is usually packaged in an iron box, also known as a high-frequency head).
The tuner is widely used, it can transmit video, sound, data and other information. Among the various types and tuners of different shapes, the most common and discussed in this article is the tuner that transmits video content (the "tuner" below refers to this type of tuner).
With the approach of the Beijing Olympic Games and the popularity of terrestrial digital TV programs, USB TV sticks are selling well in China. The reason why a small USB TV stick can receive RF TV signals is due to the maturity of silicon tuner technology. In recent years, semiconductor process technology and IC design technology have developed rapidly, which has led to the continuous upgrading of silicon tuner technology, forming a situation where multiple technologies of silicon tuner coexist and multiple international semiconductor manufacturers participate in the competition. The hot silicon tuner technology is the focus of this article.

Tuner Introduction 1 There are many types of electronic products for tuner classification receiving radio frequency signals of modulated video, such as satellite set-top boxes, cable set-top boxes, TV sets, mobile phone TVs, computer TV cards, PCMCIA TV cards, USB TV sticks and so on. These electronic products use a variety of tuners according to their characteristics. These tuners can be classified from the following angles:
From the perspective of receiving signals, tuners are divided into three types: analog, digital, and digital-analog integration, some of which can also directly output baseband signals. From the point of view of the received signal format, analog signals can be received in full format, and digital signal reception is divided into DVB, ATSC, ISDB, DMB and so on.
Different from the signal transmission network, it can be divided into satellite tuner, cable system tuner, terrestrial broadcasting tuner and mobile phone tuner. Such as DVB-C for cable networks in Europe, DVB-T for terrestrial broadcasting, DVB-S for satellite broadcasting, DVB-H for handheld devices, etc.
The technology for processing signals from the tuner is divided into analog and digital. The traditional iron box tuner basically uses analog technology, while the silicon tuner uses digital technology.
The tuner circuit architecture can be divided into the following categories: single conversion IF output, single conversion low IF output, single conversion zero IF output, double conversion IF output, double conversion low IF output, and double conversion zero IF output, etc. .
There are two ways to change the tuning frequency from the tuner: voltage synthesis and frequency synthesis.

2 Basic working principle of the tuner The simplest tuner of the circuit is a single conversion intermediate frequency output tuner. Its basic components include mixer, oscillator, phase-locked loop (MOPLL) and high-frequency amplifier. The high-frequency amplifier has an automatic gain control (AGC) function, and the tracking filter is a band-pass filter with an adjustable center frequency. The intermediate frequency filter is a band-pass filter with special transmission characteristics, generally a surface acoustic wave filter (SAWF). The circuit architecture of the single conversion intermediate frequency output tuner is shown in Figure 1:

The radio frequency TV signal enters the tuner's high-frequency amplifier for amplification, its gain is automatically controlled by the AGC circuit, and the image signal is removed by the tracking filter, and the intermediate frequency signal is mixed out by the mixer and the local oscillator. Remove clutter, select the desired channel and further adjust the passband characteristics to complete the tuner function.

3 Current status of iron box tuners The most popular TVs at present are analog TVs. These types of televisions use iron box tuners, whose basic functions are channel selection and mixing, and belong to a single conversion intermediate frequency output architecture.
Iron box tuners are mostly composed of tuner-specific ICs and many discrete devices. The main chip adopts bipolar technology, which has the advantage of extremely low cost. Because the tuner processes high-frequency signals of several hundred MHz, the tin box tuner uses microstrip and distributed parameter devices. When the induction coil needs to be produced, its distribution parameters are manually adjusted. The early iron box tuners used voltage synthesis to select channels, and most of them currently use frequency synthesis. Their advantages are simple channel selection, tuning lock, and not easy to run.
After years of technological development, the design and process technology of the traditional iron box tuner is very mature. Although it has many circuit devices and complex structure, it is very difficult to produce and debug. However, its cost is currently very low, as long as it is less than 10 yuan, which is why it has an absolute advantage in the highly competitive analog TV market, and it cannot be replaced by silicon tuners. But it will certainly be replaced by silicon tuners with the cessation of analog TV broadcasts in countries around the world.

4 Several key technical indicators of the tuner As an electronic product, the tuner has several important electrical performance indicators:
Dynamic range: Dynamic range refers to the range of input signal strength that the tuner can receive. Terrestrial television broadcasting has the greatest requirement for dynamic range, about 60 ~ 70dB, cable propagation mode is about 30 ~ 40dB, and satellite propagation mode dynamic range requires the smallest.
Noise index: also called noise figure, which is the ratio of the signal-to-noise ratio before and after the input and output of the system, that is, the signal-to-noise ratio of the input signal over the signal-to-noise ratio of the output signal. It determines the minimum receivable signal strength of the tuner, or receiving sensitivity. At present, the noise figure of digital terrestrial television broadcasting must not be higher than 7dB, while the noise figure of cable systems is less than 10dB.
Image rejection ratio: is the ability to filter out the image channel signal. The characteristics of the mixer determine that the channel whose intermediate frequency is two times higher or lower than the desired channel frequency will also be output to the subsequent intermediate frequency filter, which will cause interference to the desired channel. Therefore, a tracking filter (also called image rejection filter) must be added in front of the mixer to filter out the image channel. Usually the tuner image rejection must reach 50 ~ 60dB.
Phase noise: Phase noise is defined as the ratio of the signal power to the total signal power within a 1 Hz bandwidth at that frequency. The local oscillator signal of the tuner is susceptible to the interference of noise clutter and jitter, that is, the phase change, which is the phase noise of the tuner. Because digital TV signals mostly use quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and four-phase phase shift keying modulation, phase noise will directly affect the output signal-to-noise ratio of the digital tuner. The analog TV signals are mostly amplitude modulated (AM) or frequency modulated (FM), which is not easily interfered by phase noise. Usually the phase noise of the tuner must reach more than 50dB.

Technical Analysis of Silicon Tuner

1 Silicon tuner technology analysis Using advanced digital design technology and silicon semiconductor technology, most of the discrete devices in the original iron box tuner are integrated into a silicon chip. This is the silicon tuner.
At present, silicon tuner technology is developing rapidly, and silicon tuner which has been applied to a variety of electronic products has been released. However, its cost is still high, and the market price is about three times that of the tin box tuner, which limits its speed to replace the tin box tuner. Only in the small products such as PCMCIA TV card, USB TV stick, etc., the silicon tuner makes full use of its small size and is unique.
With the improvement of silicon tuner design technology, its semiconductor manufacturing process is also constantly updated, and its purpose is to significantly reduce costs. The first-generation silicon tuner uses the SiGe process commonly used in the field of high-frequency semiconductors, but its cost is high. Later, it moved to the BiCMOS process, but it is still more expensive than the bipolar process used by the tin box tuner. The latest generation of silicon tuners can already use the commonly used CMOS process. This allows the silicon tuner to be integrated with a demodulator, decoder, controller, etc. using the same COMS process to form a SoC single chip, which greatly reduces the system cost.
The silicon tuner uses digital processing technology, and its characteristics can be changed by programming through the control port. In this way, the silicon tuner easily implements multiple TV reception standards.
The silicon tuner market is currently a situation in which multiple semiconductor manufacturing processes, multiple technical architectures, and multiple products from multiple manufacturers coexist. For applications in different fields, different technical architectures have played their respective advantages.
The advantages and disadvantages of various circuit architectures of silicon tuners will be different due to the unique technologies of different manufacturers, so different manufacturers will have different preferences for different circuit architectures. At present, the zero-IF and complex variable mixing architectures have the most development prospects.

2 Common Silicon Tuners Infineon has launched silicon tuner chips such as TUA6041, TUA6045 and TUA6039. The next generation is silicon tuner products represented by TUA8010 and TUS9090.
Maxim products include MAX2165, MAX3580, MAX3540, and MAX3541 and other highly integrated single-conversion TV tuner.
Microtune's silicon chip tuner products include: MT2060 series low-power digital tuner and MT2131 and MT2063 multi-standard, multi-mode silicon tuner chips.

Xceive has launched a new generation of highly integrated silicon tuner XC5000 and tuner chip module SN5000.
NXP silicon tuner has TDA18292HN, TDA18252HN, TDA18271, TDA18251HD, TDA18211HD, etc., covering a variety of applications such as satellite, cable, ground, handheld mobile and so on.
Max-Linear has launched the global standard silicon tuner MxL5005S, which can be used for set-top boxes and mobile reception. MxL7001 is a silicon tuner chip suitable for ISDB-T standard for mobile TV.
Freescale has launched the MC44S803 single-chip silicon tuner Samsung Electronics' (Samsung) silicon tuner S5M8602 that can support TV standards in many countries including DVB-H / T, DAB-IP, ISDB-T and T-DMB.
Companies such as ST and TI that already have demodulation and decoding chips have integrated silicon tuners with demodulators, decoders, controllers, etc. to form SoC single chips, such as ST ’s STB6100 single chip, TI ’s “ Hollywood "mobile TV chips, etc.

3 Typical application of silicon tuner In many silicon tuner solutions, this paper selects the new digital-analog integrated silicon tuner TDA18271 recently launched by NXP, and briefly introduces its application examples on computer TV cards. TDA18271 is not only compatible with all analog and digital TV standards (PAL, NTSC, SECAM, DVB-T, ISDB-T, ATSC, DVB-C), and the TDA18271 chip itself can send intermediate frequency signals to the digital intermediate frequency demodulator TDA8295 Analog TV demodulation, output CVBS analog TV signal, meanwhile, the intermediate frequency signal is also sent to the channel decoder TDA10048 to solve the digital TV TS stream. The specific application block diagram is shown in Figure 2.

Iron box tuner compared with silicon tuner

Although some performance indicators are not as good as iron box tuners, silicon tuners also meet the requirements of digital / analog broadcasting standards. At this stage, only high cost is the main disadvantage of silicon tuners.
The popularity of digital TV broadcasting around the world has provided an excellent opportunity for the development of silicon tuners. The small size of silicon tuners has also opened up new application areas such as USB TV sticks for tuners. In another two years, with the popularity of silicon tuners, the cost will be almost the same as the cost of iron box tuners. By then, silicon tuners will dominate the world. At the same time, with the improvement of silicon tuner technology level and the reduction of cost, the competition in the silicon tuner market will become more fierce. At present, the "chaos" situation of such manufacturers with many varieties will change. Only a few full-featured, high-performance, low-cost silicon tuners can meet the needs of various fields.

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