Silicon Image Scores Design Win for Chipset Bound For 4K Phone in China

Silicon Image said it secured a “key design win” with the announcement that Nubia, a step-up brand from Chinese smartphone company ZTE, will incorporate MHL 3.0 (Mobile High-Definition Link) in its flagship Z7 smartphone. The Z7, using Silicon Image’s SiI8620 and SiI6031 MHL 3.0 chipset, is the first smartphone to implement simultaneous 4K UHD video and high-speed data, part of the latest MHL specification. It’s the first 4K smartphone made by a Chinese brand, Silicon Image said.

For Nubia, the first domestic brand in China to announce an MHL 3.0-equipped phone, it provides a differentiating feature in a highly competitive smartphone market, Jim Chase, Silicon chief evangelist & senior director-business development, told Consumer Electronics Daily. “With the high rate of adoption of 4K by consumers in China,” the market holds “very good potential for us,” Chase said. Some 90 percent of TVs produced in China today are 4K, he said, with consumption in the 60-70 percent range.

"Chinese consumers are embracing 4K displays very aggressively,” Chase said. Prices are dropping and “you're seeing some transition in the marketplace,” he said, citing an easing of government restrictions that’s allowing tier-two and tier-three mobile network operators to enter the market by sub-licensing spectrum from government-backed service providers. That’s creating a highly promotional environment, and Silicon Image expects smartphone providers will offer 4K content over 4G networks as one of the areas of differentiation, Chase said. “Having that kind of content coming into an MHL 3.0 phone like the Nubia Z7 will open up some new ways for consumers to get that content,” he said.

Chase conceded that the 4K devices in China “are ahead of the content,” as in the U.S. He called the scenario “pretty typical,” citing the slow rollout of 3D and ATSC content after hardware was available. Chase wasn’t able to quantify the number of MHL 3.0-equipped 4K TVs in China but said those numbers are very limited even in the U.S. market as the technology begins to roll out. Samsung announced at CES it will have MHL 3.0-equipped TVs this year -- offering “a new level of UHD connectivity between smartphones, tablets and Samsung UHD TVs” -- and Silicon Image announced at the same time that its dual-mode MHL 3.0/HDMI 2.0 receiver had been designed into Samsung’s latest Ultra High Definition TVs. Sony also is designing MHL 3.0 chipsets in model 2014 TVs, Chase said.

In addition to its 4K signal transmission, MHL 3.0 features include simultaneous charging of the mobile device, along with transmission of photos and games and movies with up to eight channels of digital audio, according to specs. Consumers can control MHL-enabled mobile devices using the existing TV remote, also as part of the specification, said a news release (http://bit.ly/1dKOrUv).

There has been discussion about the need for ultra-high-resolution on screen sizes as big as 50 inches in the TV space. As for what resolution improvements a 4K smartphone display could bring to the viewing experience, Chase said, “We're seeing first-run 4K content already available in 4K in theaters. I think there’s interest in consumers viewing that content,” he said. “It’s a matter of when it’s available.” He said high-resolution smartphone displays have existed for several years so costs have been amortized.

Allowing a phone to act as the content aggregator so consumers can view it on a 4K display is a “fairly intuitive use case,” Chase said. Recent restrictions put in place in China for how over-the-top set-top boxes can be used are going to “further push content toward the mobile phone,” he said. Chase contrasted the U.S. market -- where power users carry as many as four mobile devices on a given trip -- with the China market, where a smartphone is typically the one device serving a consumer’s needs for computing, Internet access, apps, video and music. “If you have a smartphone that can also act as your entertainment player or your gaming device, that gives you a cut above the competition,” he said.

Stepping up to 4K transmission on a mobile device requires more power, Chase noted. It takes “slightly” more power to receive a 4K signal, but “definitely” more to decode a 4K video stream, he said. That’s one of the reasons MHL 3.0’s charging capability was boosted to 10 watts, he said.