MaxLinear Inc., a fabless semiconductor company that develops all-CMOS broadband radio-frequency and mixed-signal IC solutions for consumer markets has announced the MxL20xRF family of silicon tuners for the global cable TV market.

 

The company has targeted this ultra low power silicon tuner family at set-top-boxes, digital video recorders, cable modems, EMTAs, cable gateways and cable-enabled televisions.

 

The new silicon tuner family is built on MaxLinear’s CMOS process-based technology and is compatible with ANSI/SCTE40, DOCSIS/EURODOCSIS, and ITU-T J.83 cable industry standards. It also delivers the low cost, low power consumption and the heat dissipation benefits of CMOS technology.

 

MaxLinear also promotes its new tuner family as the greenest product in the market as it consumes only 400 mW of power and a four-tuner, channel agile DOCSIS 3.0 system can be built with the power budget of just one competing device that just consumes only 1.6 watt of power and has limited capture bandwidth.

 

Measuring only 5mm x 5mm in a 32-pin QFN package, the MxL20xRF tuners feature very high levels of integration resulting in a low bill of materials cost and providing manufacturers a lower cost front-end solution for new product designs and an aggressive cost down path for existing designs.

 

MaxLinear has claimed that cable TV markets provide a great opportunity for them as there is a desire for low power and small size thanks to the popularity of multi-tuner designs and a growing requirement to reduce power consumption. For instance if their tuners are built into 150 million cable-tuner units they can save approximately 150 Megawatts of power generation and consumption and also millions of dollars in energy savings.

 

The company’s MxL20xRF tuners allow cable consumer premise equipment manufacturers to deliver the smallest and lowest power cable digital transport adapters, and greatly ease the design and lower the cost and power of more complex multi-tuner STBs and residential gateways.

 

MaxLinear has stated that the MxL201RF was developed mainly for the North American cable market and the MxL203RF was developed specifically for China, Europe and India DVB-C markets.

 

MaxLinear had partnered with Hauppauge Digital (News - Alert) to deliver an Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards-based PCTV minicard for ultra-mobile PCs and MaxLinear's MxL5007T was chosen for Stylish Digital Stream.