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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (41726)	6/3/1999 1:03:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

Mitel Ships Module For Satellite Set-Tops (Fred: BRCM competitor) (06/03/99, 12:47 p.m. ET) By Junko Yoshida, EDTN Mitel Semiconductor has rolled out a highly integrated front-end solution for digital satellite set-top boxes. The satellite network interface module 3 (SNIM3) is made up of four ICs that provide the complete front-end functionality of a set-top box. Theparts can replace "a number of fairly complex discrete ICs and RF components, which, in the past, had to be sourced from a variety of companies and then put together by the system designers," said Richard Crossley, product marketing manager for satellite products at Mitel, in Kanata, Ontario. Chips for the RF section include a direct-conversion IC, a single-chip phase-locked loop (PLL) frequency synthesizer, and a low-noise amplifier (LNA). The fourth device is a digital QPSK/FEC channel-decoder IC for the baseband digital section of the front-end solution. The three RF ICs and digital chip are being fabricated at Mitel's facilities in Swindon, United Kingdom, and are available in full production quantities today. The company will use Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s 0.35-micron CMOS process as a backup for the digital channel-decoder IC as volumes ramp. "The total cost for an OEM to build a complete implementation of the front-end design by using the SNIM3 chip set as well as a few other transistors should be less than $10," Crossley said. The highly integrated direct-conversion IC requires no tracking filters. The single-chip design replaces a conventional tin-box tuner implementation and is less susceptible to interference, Crossley said. The PLL frequency synthesizer was designed to offer low-phase-noise performance to facilitate front-end performance at rates as low as 1 Mbaud. The LNA is an optional IC that replaces approximately 20 RF passive components, such as an IF oscillator, IF mixer, and SAW filter. The VP310 QPSK/FEC channel-decoder IC, for the baseband digital section of the system, packs dual A/D converters and an FEC that features full digital timing and phase-recovery loops plus on-chip digital filtering. The SNIM3 chip set can be used for either DSS or DVB, the two major transmission standards. DSS, exclusively used in the United States for the reception of DirecTV services, uses a single data rate at 20 Msamples per second. DVB, used by Echostar in the United States and other operators in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, supports a range of data rates, from 1 to 45 Msamples per second.