Samsung Electronics announced that it has completed development of a new digital TV receiver chip, the S5H1406, establishing a new standard for terrestrial (VSB) and cable (QAM) digital TV broadcasting performance.

Samsung's new chip enables digital TV receivers to acquire and track signals in harsh environments such as multi-path channel conditions, dynamic conditions with multiple signal variations and where the overall receiving capability is weak.

By implementing the company's proprietary algorithm, the S5H1406 offers quick access to signals that reduce transmission interference. The S5H1406 also offers an advanced demodulator and synchronization detector, high performance equalizer and Forward Error Correction (FEC).

Last July, Samsung announced its completion of development of a SoC device S5H2200 that integrates a dual MPEG-2 decoder, CPU and the company's proprietary image improvement function known as the DNIe, or "Digital Natural Image engine."

"With the highly-integrated SoC device for digital TV we introduced last year, Samsung now offers a total solution in the digital TV area, from broadcast reception to image playback and image quality enhancement," said Dojun Rhee, vice president of Samsung Electronics' SoC R&D Center.

In independent field tests, the S5H1406 succeeded in acquiring and tracking the signals of five domestic terrestrial digital TV broadcasts. Based on the overall evaluation, Samsung's advanced receiver chip exceeds current levels of reception performance in the marketplace today.

Samsung's S5H1406 digital TV receiver chip will be made available to customers in Asia in the first quarter of 2005.