Design of a highly integrated tuner suitable for analog and digital TV systems

This paper presents the design of a highly integrated tuner suitable for analog and digital terrestrial TV applications. The tuner system implements an additional up-conversion stage, which allows allocation of any TV channel at IF to the terrestrial TV frequency band (47-860 MHz). This way, applications of conventional tuner systems are expanded. Results based on standard tests have shown that the designed tuner is able to deliver the necessary performance in terms of selectivity, <-35 dB to adjacent channel protection ratio, SNR of 54 dB, in band spurious emissions lower than 60 dBc and ΔIMD₃ of 52.8 dB worst case. Finally it has been also demonstrated that with a careful design of the analog components (mixers and oscillators) the restrictive specifications of the TV tuner can be fulfilled by implementing the tuner in a low-cost standard technology (0.8 μm SiGe). The total power consumption of the complete tuner is around 390 mA from a 5 V power supply.