LSI Logic Announces New Generation Tuner and Channel Receiver Chip Set For Set-Top Box Manufacturers
Offered With NDS' Direct Conversion Satellite Developer's Kit, the New
High-Performance Chip Set Provides Low-Cost, DBS-Compliant Solutions To Set-Top Box Designers
MILPITAS, Calif., Feb. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Bolstering its leadership in the digital satellite set-top box market, LSI Logic today announced the L64733/34, a new-generation tuner and channel-receiver chip set that can be implemented directly on the motherboard or on a module smaller than a credit card. The chip set provides the essential functionality to support a range of advanced set-top box applications, including video entertainment, Internet data delivery and wireless communications.
The L64733/34 chip set combines a range of components into just two devices, removing the need for cumbersome ''tuner can''implementations as well as additional synthesizer chips. The new chip set provides highly integrated, high-performance, DBS-complaint solutions for direct conversion satellite demodulation, forming a complete ''L band-to-bits'' system.
''As the set-top box market explodes, we know that our customers must continually provide the highest-performance, lowest-cost set-top box solutions available,'' said Simon Dolan, vice president of marketing, LSI Logic Consumer Products Division. ''By combining our channel technology with a tuner IC into a compact design, we offer maximum flexibility, reliability and integration. At the same time, we
effectively reduce costs while ensuring robust performance and world standards compliance.''
The chip set delivers key technical advantages over previous or three-chip implementations. The L64733/34 offers designers a proprietary frequency doubler, used in the synthesizer, that minimizes board layout effort. It also eliminates external IF or baseband filters for lower part counts and higher reliability. Equally important, it operates from 1-45 Mbaud, ensuring worldwide DBS capability.
The L64733/34 consists of the L64733 zero-IF tuner IC, which performs the RF down conversion, and the L64734 QPSK demodulator. The L64733 has an on-chip synthesizer that reduces the RF part count, resulting in a highly simplified design. The L64734 generates the control signals for the L64733 synthesizer using an on-chip microcontroller to manage the tuning function along with other acquisition and tracking functions. The L64734 also controls the low-pass baseband filters and generate the control voltages for automatic gain control on the L64733.
To accelerate the integration of the chip set into set-top box or PC card designs, NDS, a leading international expert in MPEG-2 satellite systems and a system design consultant to LSI-Logic on the L64733034 development, produced a Direct Conversion Satellite Developer's. The kit consists of printed circuit board layout information and demodulator driver software, enabling manufacturers to develop and
test the solutions with minimal time and engineering resources. An evaluation pack for the kit is also available from NDS, and it includes a sample demodulator Network Interface Module (NIM), which is the size of a credit card, a motherboard, and ''plug and play'' evaluation software for Windows 95.
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