Going to CES? Check out the demo by Saankhya Labs. They just announced the launch of their latest next-gen digital terrestrial TV demodulator chipsets, SL3000 and SL4000. As reported by The Times of India and many other media outlets, the chipset is part of the Pruthvi-3 series, and it's being manufactured on Samsung Foundry's 28nm FD-SOI technology. Saankhya Labs says they'll be sampling in the 1st Quarter of 2019.
[UPDATE 9 January 2019: Per a press release issued at CES, the chipset was launched by ONE Media 3.0, LLC, a subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group, and Saankhya Labs in collaboration with VeriSilicon and Samsung Foundry. This announcement follows Sinclair Broadcast Group’s recent commitment to a nationwide roll-out of ATSC 3.0 ("Next Gen TV") service and its past announcement to fund millions of chipsets giveaways for wireless operators. Sinclair is a major TV station operator in the US.
The PR goes on to say that the demodulator SoC was designed and developed by Saankhya Labs with ASIC turnkey design and manufacturing services from VeriSilicon, using Samsung Foundry’s state of the art 28FDS (its Fully Depleted SOI process technology), chosen for its unique low power capabilities offered by the back bias option.]
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(Courtesy: @SaankhyaLabs)[/caption]
The Pruthvi-3 is an upgrade of Saankyha's Software Defined Radio (SDR) chipsets for Direct to Mobile (DTM) applications, which address video bandwidth congestion and other challenges, including internet access for the vast populations of rural users found in India and worldwide. (DYK half the world still lacks access!?)
The company says the SL300x will be the industry’s first SDR-based DTV Demodulator that supports all the leading broadcast terrestrial, cable and satellite TV standards including the ATSC 3.0. The SOC is designed to deliver high performance and high throughput in static and multipath environments. A power-efficient, small footprint device, it targets DTV receiver applications such as digital televisions, set top boxes, home theatres and automotive entertainment systems. The SL400x – for mobile phones and tablets – is designed to be the most technologically advanced and highly-integrated single chip Mobile DTV Receiver in the industry. The full featured front-end SOC integrates UHF RF tuner, baseband DTV demodulator, FEC decoder, de-interleaver memory and Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) in a single chip.
Here is a brief YouTube video of the company's CEO at the launch event, explaining why they see this chipset as a game changer.
India Times reports that there are already 5 million of the chipsets in pre-order to companies in the US and China.
