5 year-old venture enterprise has successfully created domestic ‘Hybrid TV tuner chip’, which the country had been entirely dependent on importation. It replaces about 55 million USD worth importation.
RAMICS announced on the 13th that they have developed and produced tuner ‘R5530’ for analog and digital TV that qualifies for 11 global ground·cable broadcasting standard. The product has recently been applied on Samsung Electronics’ TV.
TV tuner is chip that allows the remote controller and antenna to receive ground·cable TV signal directly. It senses the channel that the user desires and turns to it. Also it gets rid of other wave signals such as WiFi·LTE48. It adjusts to the environment and controls weak and strong signals stabilized while receiving TV signal.
TV tuner business has been mainly occupied by oversea companies such as Silicon Labs, NXP. Domestic market has been monopolized by Silicon Labs for years. It is a complicated product that has to qualify for all the analog and digital broadcasting signals and put 11 global standard into one chip.
There had been many cases within South Korea to develop the Hybrid TV tuner chip set. The structuring technology for digital RF System on Chip (SoC) wasn’t good enough so there hadn’t been successful development. Domestic major companies had also tried to develop the TV tuner but had to stop due to requirement of high technology level.
RAMICS is company established in December of 2009, founded by digital mobile TV RF development team and experts. They had focused solely on hybrid TV tuner that is applied on to home TV for the last 5 years. Thus they selected the digital RF architecture and RF tuner and analog TV demodulator and made it into a chip for the first time domestically and supplied via SoC.
They were sponsored by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE) component technology development business and ETRI’s EDA too support. They started producing end of last year and made first sales this year. They have set 119 million USD as their total sales goal.