The Si2151/41 family provides an ideal, cost-effective silicon TV tuner solution for the world’s leading producer of TVs: China. According to DisplaySearch, China has led the world in TV shipments four years in a row.

Silicon Labs’ Si2151/41 tuners fully comply with the China GB/T 26686-2011 general specification for digital terrestrial television receivers and achieve significant margin to the minimum performance requirements defined in the GB/T 26686-2011 specification. Unlike other silicon tuners, which offer a large margin to the China GB/T 26686-2011 specification only for the VHF-Low frequency band, the Si2151/41 tuners deliver a large margin to this specification for the VHF-Low, VHF-High and UHF frequency bands.

The current broadcasts in China use the UHF band (in which the Si2151/41 tuners significantly outperform all other silicon TV tuners), and margin in that band translates into tangible reception benefits for the consumer.

The Si2151 tuner has been certified by the China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI) and its Advanced Digital TV Test Center (ADTC) as a TV tuner solution that fully supports the Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) standard for mobile and fixed TV terminals used in China, Hong Kong and Macau.

The Si2151 was the only CESI-certified TV tuner to be announced at the Information Technology Standardization (ITS) Forum held on July 16, 2014. CESI is the leading Chinese government organization overseeing the DTMB standard.

Available in the TV industry’s tiniest package (3 mm x 3 mm QFN), the Si2151/41 devices are the smallest TV tuner ICs available today. This ultra-compact package, combined with minimal BOM count, enables the smallest footprint of any silicon TV tuner in the market today: 0.86 cm2.

As the TV market trends to ever smaller modules and on-board tuner designs and to multi-tuner applications, small footprint and ultra-low power consumption make the Si2151/41 tuners the clear choice for current and future TV and set-top box (STB) designs.

The Si2151/41 tuners deliver the lowest BOM cost of any terrestrial/cable TV tuner in mass production today. Unlike competing TV tuners, the Si2151/41 devices require no balun on the RF input, and they integrate all tracking filter inductors, which dramatically reduces system cost and complexity.

The Si2151/41 tuners require no external power transistor for single-supply operation and eliminate the need for external inductive power supply filtering, resulting in the most cost-effective, highest performance on-board TV tuner designs. Improvements in noise figure across the band and greater immunity to undesired signals such as LTE transmissions without any external filtering help the Si2151/41 family to deliver unmatched reception robustness over global real-world scenarios.

The Si2151/41 family shares a common application programming interface (API) with Silicon Labs’ entire TV tuner portfolio. This shared software API reduces the TV designer’s learning curve when migrating from worldwide hybrid HDTVs to regionalized platforms and STB designs. A simple application circuit, common across all of Silicon Labs’ TV tuners, makes on-board installations straightforward with immediate cost savings.