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Jim Barthold
While cable modems and digital set-tops were garnering the attention last week at the National Show, the things that make them run were drawing their own little crowds.
Broadcom Corp., which is becoming the industry's de facto digital chip supplier, said it had signed up Pace Micro Technology plc, Panasonic Inc., Pioneer New Media Technologies Inc. and Scientific-Atlanta Inc. for its latest digital chips.
"GI (General Instrument Corp.) is using a part that precedes this and is using a follow-up part as well," emphasized Sandy MacInnis, Broadcom's director-digital video technology. "They're already a huge customer of ours."
The new chips, he said, are "essentially three chips in one. It's the upstream modulator, the downstream in-band QAM and the out-of-band receiver with the built-in agile tuner functions with forward error correction."
Integration, he emphasized, brings down costs and boosts the efficiency of the chips for use in digital set-tops and cable modems.
Also integrating chips was Conexant Systems Inc. which brought out a single chip cable modem reference design as part of its planned family of digital broadband products.
In addition to cutting costs by as much as 25% compared to other chips, the Conexant solution also offers a software-upgradable path, said John Graham, VP-computer products, who called the soft MAC (media access control) "somewhat revolutionary" and said the company was proving itself to operators who were "skeptical we could do it."
The chips are being submitted to CableLabs for DOCSIS compliance, he added. Also in the world of chips, iGS Technologies Inc. said that Microsoft Corp. was recommending its streaming media processors for its Microsoft TV.
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