MStar Semiconductor Inc (Cayman) (開曼晨星半導體), the world’s biggest chipmaker for LCD TVs, yesterday said it has secured an order from local pay TV operator Taiwan Broadband Communications (台灣寬頻) to supply chips used in high-end set-top boxes.
The deal reinforced MStar’s belief that it will achieve its target of gaining a 10 percent to 15 percent share of the world’s advanced set-top box market.
MStar’s chips support conditional access (CA) technology, which controls pay-TV subscribers’ access to digital TV services.
The company expects business to continue to grow next quarter despite the current economic uncertainties, MStar chairman Wayne Liang (梁公偉) told reporters.
“Businesses in chips for mobile phones and set-top boxes will grow further and TV [chips] will be flat compared with the current quarter,” Liang said.
MStar began shipping set-top box chips supporting CA technology to a customer last quarter after receiving certifications from the world’s major CA technology developers such as Nagra Kudelski, which creates applications using the technology, that enable pay-TV operators to securely deliver digital content to TV set-top boxes, digital video recorders and PCs.
“We believe this deal will spark a chain effect,” Liang said.
“The shipment volume will grow gradually. We believe this is a business with big growth potential,” he said.
Taiwan Broadband plans to invest NT$1.5 billion (US$49 million) on upgrading existing set-top boxes to use CA technology as part of its effort to convert more than half of its programs to digital by 2015, from 12 percent now.
The company uses Nagra Kudelski’s technology.
“This also happening in China and other Asian nations. We also see business opportunities in South America and African [countries] are undergoing the same conversion” from analog signals to digital, Liang said.
Jean-Luc Jezouin, senior vice president and general manager of Nagra Kudelski’s New Markets Region, told a media briefing in Taipei yesterday that his company was in talks with MStar to reach emerging markets like China and India.
The timeline was hard to predict now because it usually takes the chip company at least 18 months to receive certification before shipping its products, Jezouin said.
MStar retained unchanged its target to increase revenue contribution from the set-top box business to 5 percent of its total revenues at the end of this year, Liang said.
TV chips are the main revenue source of MStar, making up 75 percent of its second-quarter revenues of NT$8.35 billion.
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