Rockwell's cable modem chip set...........................................
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Rockwell Touts $55 Chip Set
By LESLIE ELLIS
Rockwell Semiconductor Systems Inc. will hit the market with a $55, three-chip set for standards-complaint cable modems in May, executives with the chip giant said last week.
A handful of companies are already in line for the chips, including Harmonic Lightwaves Inc., 3Com Corp., NEC, Panasonic and new entrant Daewoo Electronics. The chips were designed to comply with Cable Television Laboratories Inc.'s MCNS (Multimedia Cable Network System) specification.
Daewoo -- a Korean manufacturer that emerged late last year as a finalist in Tele-Communications Inc.'s request for cable-modem proposals -- is preparing for commercial quantities of its cable modem by August.
Daewoo showed a prototype of its work at the Western Show in December, but only last week did the company and its senior research engineer, Jong Park, begin to detail its plans.
Park said that Daewoo has quietly been attending MCNS and IEEE 802.14 standards meetings for over a year. "We initially were just looking around," gathering information for an internal feasibility study, he said.
The study apparently proved lucrative enough for the Korean television manufacturer to press forward.
"We think that in the future, all consumer-electronics products will include cable modems -- we see that these high-speed communications capabilities will be key to the functionality of our products ... and we decided to start with cable modems," Park said.
Development work is ongoing in Seoul, Korea, and in Ottawa, he said.
First out of the gate will be a standards-compliant, external cable modem with selectable RF or telco-return modules. Later on, as silicon-integration moves progress, that work will be collapsed onto a single, internally mounted card, he said.
A digital set-top with an integrated cable modem may also be in Daewoo's product mix, although Park declined to discuss strategy.
Nor would Park discuss prices, except to say that initial prices "will be higher" than a desired sub-$300 modem price point, "because there are only a limited number of IC [integrated circuit] vendors for the key silicon components."
Under the hood, Daewoo is using chips from Rockwell and Stanford Telecom.
Trials with cable operators will begin shortly, in conjunction with Daewoo's headend-product partner, Harmonic, Park said.
On the chip side, Rockwell joins Broadcom Corp., Libit Signal Processing and Stanford Telecom in the race to equip boards under the cable-modem chassis.
Rockwell entered the market after purchasing Comstream Inc.'s chip business last year, said Jay Kshatri, director of broadband-modem marketing for Rockwell.
"Comstream was the first to have an integrated QAM [quadrature amplitude modulation] chip back in '94," Kshatri said, adding that those chips are widely used in direct-broadcast satellite receivers.
"Rockwell is taking this [cable-modem] business very seriously," Kshatri said.
That portfolio starts with Rockwell's 128-pin, 16-to-256 QAM demodulator, the HM2214, which also handles forward-error-correction decoding and interleaving.
On the upstream side, Rockwell's new, 100-pin HM2314 chip handles BPSK (bipolar phase shift key), QPSK (quadrature phase shift key) and 16-QAM data streams, as well as U.S. and European modulation (MCNS and DAVIC, which stands for Digital Audio Visual Council) techniques, executives said.
A third chip, the 160-pin HM8416, will handle media-access-control functions that receive, process and transfer downstream data for both RF and telco-return applications. Plus, on-board DES-complaint data encryption provides data privacy, with a variable-bit-rate input of up to 56 megabits per second, executives said.
All three chips will be sampled next month and available in production quantities in May for $55 (in quantities of 10,000). Kshatri said to watch for a single, integrated modem chip in the fourth quarter of this year.
"Our product road map is to have a single-chip PHY [physical layer], and then a chip that does the MAC [media-access control] and entire back end of the modem, and to create a programmable solution on a single chip," he said.
To accelerate development, Rockwell plans to replicate the business model that it used with dial-up modem silicon, he said. For cable modems, that acceleration plan will include a reference-design kit and a production facility in El Paso, Texas, where Rockwell will manufacture modems for vendors, he said.
This year, Rockwell expects cable-modem vendors to ship between 600,000 and 1 million modems, Kshatri said.
"We do see retail happening, and we like the looks of that because companies like Rockwell will be able to drive costs down," he said, explaining that Rockwell owns its own chip-fabrication facilities. |
