Broadcom's chip....................................
multichannel.com
Weekly Edition for July 13, 1998:
Broadcom Debuts Single Chip for Headend Data
By LESLIE ELLIS
Continuing on a rapid integration track, Broadcom Corp. last week started shipping sample quantities of a single-chip solution for cable-modem headends.
The new chip -- the BCM 3137 -- is supposed to dramatically reduce the manufacturing cost of cable-modem headends, while yielding large increases in the amount of data or number of simultaneous users that can be supported in upstream, home-to-headend data configurations.
Broadcom officials said the chip, which had been configured as 10 separate chips in a field-programmable gate array, passed through cable-modem-interoperability tests last month, making it compatible with the DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service/Interoperability Specification) standard.
What makes the chip different from the earlier Broadcom FPGA set is the addition of 16-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) for upstream communications, in addition to previously available QPSK (quadrature phase shift key) techniques common to DOCSIS.
"It represents an enormous reduction in cost," said Tim Lindenfelser, vice president of marketing for Broadcom, explaining that the previous FPGA board in use by cable-modem-headend producers like Cisco Systems Inc., Bay Networks Inc., 3Com Corp. and others cost about $3,000, while the BCM 3137 is sample-priced at $200.
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