The Geneva based startup Abilis Systems announced that IBM will be their foundry partner to manufacture its mobile TV chipset. Kudelski, the Swiss pay-TV encryption leader, is backing the company. The mobile TV chipset will integrate both the RF tuner and the demodulator on a 90nm RF CMOS process. This will improve the power consumption and probably lead to better RF characteristics as well. Any further details were not announced. That is understandable since picking a foundry partner does not mean they will be able to launch the product at a set date. A small error could mean that the chipset has to go through a re-spin, delaying product launch by 6 months or so. In any case the timing could be OK since only now is mobile TV starting to take off. Nokia e.g. announced trials in China beginning of 2007, and expects rollouts in 2008.

Abilis Systems (www.abiliss.com) is a semiconductor fabless company, founded in 2004 by a team of former Motorola SPS employees. Abilis develops single chip CMOS solutions for OFDM-based radio communication standards, including mobile TV receivers and high speed internet access transceivers. In 2005, Abilis became part of the Kudelski Group ,and actively cooperates with Nagravision to propose more secure and fully featured conditional access solutions to mobile TV operators.