Broadcom pioneers breakthrough in digital cable tuner design

The Cable Show, CHICAGO, USA: Broadcom Corp. announced the industry's first 1GHz Full-Band Capture digital tuning technology integrated in three new 40nm hybrid IP cable set-top box (STB) and DOCSIS 3.0 gateway SoC solutions. These deliver the cable tuner density and performance that operators need to convert current cable systems to IP-based video platforms. Visit Broadcom.com for more news.

Broadcom's FBC provides scalable bandwidth while reducing power, cost and simplifying cable tuner design while accelerating the deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 cable gateways and hybrid IP cable STBs. Hybrid IP cable STBs will more efficiently bring additional video streams and IP services to connected devices in the home ecosystem and are expected to grow at 40 percent through 2014.

Key advantages
* Broadcom's FBC technology directly digitizes the entire 1GHz downstream spectrum, replacing the need for a large number of tuners with only one FBC digital tuner. Full-Band Capture technology advantages include:
Digital tuning: engineered with new enhanced signal processing techniques that exceed the most challenging performance requirements demanded by operators.

Bandwidth deployment flexibility: any demodulator can tune to any frequency removing wideband "block" tuner restrictions.
Reduced power consumption: more than 50 percent reduction with new tuner architecture.

Faster channel change: FastRTV channel change technology paired with Full-Band Capture provides quick channel change regardless of frequency.

Reduced system cost: dramatically minimizes the number of components by replacing up to nine cable tuners in a system with only one FBC digital tuner supporting as many demodulators as required.

* Broadcom's 40nm 8-QAM BCM3128 and 4-QAM BCM3124 cable multi-receiver SoCs and the 400 Mbps BCM3383 Euro/DOCSIS 3.0 cable gateway SoC are the industry's first fully integrated solutions to support FBC technology and are now shipping to customers.