MaxLinear Enters Cable TV Market With New Ultra Low Power Silicon Tuner Family

CARLSBAD, CA--(Marketwire - August 10, 2009) - MaxLinear Inc., a fabless semiconductor company at the forefront of developing all-CMOS broadband radio-frequency (RF) & mixed-signal IC solutions for consumer markets, today announced the MxL20xRF family of silicon tuners developed for the global digital cable market. This brand new family of devices is aimed at set-top-boxes (STBs), digital video recorders (DVRs), cable modems, EMTAs, cable gateways and cable-enabled televisions.

The MxL20xRF family uses MaxLinear's proprietary digital CMOS process-based technology to deliver the highest performance in accordance with the ANSI/SCTE40, DOCSIS/EURODOCSIS, and ITU-T J.83 cable industry standards. The devices feature integrated channel filtering and on-chip 94dB gain to deliver high quality signal reception of weak signals even under conditions of significant channel loading, severe transmission spectrum tilt, and strong adjacent digital and analog channel blockers.

The new tuners consume only 400mW of power each, meaning a four-tuner, channel agile DOCSIS 3.0 system can be built with the power budget of just one competing device, which typically consumes more than 1.6 Watts of power and has limited capture bandwidth. They also offer the smallest tuner footprint enabling designers to implement ultra compact front-end solutions, especially for complex, multi-tuner DVR/PVRs and transport gateways.

The low power properties of the MxL20xRF tuners facilitate compliance with Energy Star standards in both standby and operating modes. Additionally, the new tuners can be implemented on simple two-layer PCBs and do not require any provisions for thermal management, which saves costs associated with the fans, shields and heat sinks required for competing tuners.

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 (BOM) cost and providing manufacturers a lower cost front-end solution for new product designs and an aggressive cost down path for existing designs.

"The cable TV systems market has the hallmarks of the next great growth opportunity for MaxLinear -- a desire for low power and small size thanks to the popularity of multi-tuner designs and a growing requirement to reduce power consumption. Using our tuner, the power consumption of every tuner in a cable box can be reduced by nearly 1 Watt. If we assume a market size of about 150 million cable-tuner units in North America, 150 Megawatts of power generation and consumption can be eliminated annually. So, this is an incredibly green solution," said Kishore Seendripu, Chief Executive Officer of MaxLinear. "Our MxL20xRF tuners allow cable consumer premise equipment (CPE) manufacturers to deliver the smallest and lowest power cable digital transport adapters (DTA), and greatly ease the design and lower the cost and power of more complex multi-tuner STBs and residential gateways."

All of MaxLinear's products are based on a standard digital CMOS architecture. MaxLinear's engineers have been able to adapt CMOS to the high-performance demands of the cable TV tuner market, while leveraging the technology's small size, low power and low cost advantages.

The products in the family include the MxL201RF which was developed mainly for the North American cable markets, but can be used for any digital cable application as it supports digital cable standards including ITU-T J.83 Annexes A and C [DVB-C] for Europe, China and India and Annex B [North American Cable], DOCSIS, and EURODOCSIS as well as digital terrestrial reception standards (DVB-T/H, ATSC, ISDB-T and DTMB).

The MxL203RF was developed specifically for China, Europe and India DVB-C markets.

Availability

The MxL201RF and MxL203RF are in production and are shipping to key customers. Contact MaxLinear for ordering information.

About MaxLinear, Inc.

MaxLinear, Inc. is a rapidly growing fabless IC company focusing on highly integrated analog products that incorporate proprietary mixed-signal and radio frequency signal processing techniques in digital CMOS. The company's technology is ideally suited for a broad range of high-volume consumer electronics applications with the strictest requirements for both power and performance, including personal computers, laptop computers, set-top-boxes, televisions, and mobile devices. MaxLinear is the first to deliver on the promise of an easy-to-use silicon solution to enable TV on any device. The company is located in Carlsbad, California with sales offices world wide. More information is at www.maxlinear.com.

MaxLinear and the MaxLinear logo are trademarks of MaxLinear, Inc. Other trademarks appearing herein are the property of their respective owners.