Broadcom Unveils Innovative Digital Cable Tuner Design

- Industry's first implementation of fully digital full-band capture technology
- Leading the transition to a hybrid IP-based cable platform

June 21, 2011 – Broadcom, a global wired and wireless semiconductor company, today announced 1GHz full-band capture digital tuning technology integrated into three new 40nm hybrid IP cable set-top boxes (STBs) and DOCSIS 3.0 gateway SoC solutions. This new technology provides the cable tuner density and performance required by operators when converting current cable systems to IP-based video platforms.

Broadcom’s newly introduced full-band capture technology reduces power and costs while providing highly scalable bandwidth. Furthermore, it simplifies cable tuner designs and enables the rapid adoption of DOCSIS 3.0 cable gateways and hybrid IP cable set-top boxes. Hybrid IP cable set-top boxes provide additional video streaming and IP services more efficiently and are expected to grow by 40% by 2014, according to market research firm In-Stat.

Broadcom's full-band capture technology directly digitizes the entire 1 GHz downstream spectrum and replaces a large number of tuners with a single full-band capture digital tuner. The following are the features of Broadcom's full-band capture technology.

 Digital Tuning: Newly enhanced signal processing technology satisfies the most demanding performance requirements of operators.
 Flexibility of bandwidth introduction: Any demodulator can eliminate broadband “cutoff” tuner limitations and tune to all frequencies.
 Reduced power consumption: Reduces by more than 50% with the new tuner architecture.
 Faster Channel Switching: Full-band capture enables fast channel switching regardless of frequency with FastRTV™ channel switching technology.
 System cost reduction: By replacing up to nine existing cable tuners with a single full-band capture digital tuner, it supports as many demodulators as needed while significantly reducing the number of components.

Broadcom's 40nm 8-QAM BCM3128, 4-QAM BCM3124 cable multi-transceiver SoC, and 400Mbps BCM3383 Euro/DOCSIS 3.0 cable gateway SoC are the industry's first fully integrated solutions supporting full-band capture technology.

Dan Marotta, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom’s Broadband Communications Group, stated, “Broadcom, leading the next cutting edge of cable TV, reduces the cost of transitioning current cable platforms to hybrid IP-based solutions with groundbreaking tuner designs. This enables IP content and services to be delivered and spread across homes as well as connected devices.”