FM Tuners Shrink For Cell Phones

NEAsia has a great tech analysis covering FM tuners and their introduction to the mobile phones market.

“Estimating the market scale for mobile phone FM tuner ICs from Royal Philips’ monthly shipments of several million chips, it would seem to be on a par with the 70 million chips annually demanded for home-use audio equipment. And the number of FM mobile phones is still growing strong. KDDI only offers three models currently, but as Takashi Kamiyama, leader, Media Business Group, Media Business Dept, Content and Media Div at KDDI pointed out, “We plan to increase the number of models offering FM reception. It may end up as a standard mobile phone function.” A source at Nokia’s public relations section added, “FM radio reception is consistently rated highly in user questionnaires. It is likely that we’ll be implementing the function in more models in the future.” Vodafone KK of Japan has also started sale of FM mobile phones.”

There are already a lot of phones that integrate FM tuners into their designs, whether they are built into the headphones or the inline cable. We would love to see a more integrated approach however where the user is not dependant on a specific “special” set of ear buds. This analysis is a good read if this is something that will spark your interest.

Read more at NEAsia