Product category:
Analogue and Mixed Signal ICs
News Release from: Analog Devices | Subject: AD9877
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 22 November 2001
Mixed-signal front end aims for set-top
boxes
Analog Devices has released the AD9877, the newest member of its Mixed-Signal Front End (MxFE) product family.
Responding to set-top box and cable modem manufacturers' demands for technologies that allow them to differentiate their products in hardware Analog Devices has released the AD9877, the newest member of its Mixed-Signal Front End (MxFE) product family Based on ADI's "smart partitioning" methodology - a performance-enhancing design technique that partitions the signal path according to performance metrics rather than analogue/digital boundaries - the AD9877 sets the mixed-signal front end standard for broadband modems in a low-cost, low-power package
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 2 Jul 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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Set-top box and cable modem manufacturers can now dedicate the analogue and mixed-signal processing to ADI's MxFE chip, while fully exploiting their own proprietary intellectual property in the development of a unique digital ASIC, the building block of their set-top box or cable modem.
"When faced with extreme cost pressure and increasing standardisation, our customers are looking for new ways to differentiate their products, while holding down the bottom-line costs", said Dave Robertson, product line director, High-speed Converters Group, Analog Devices.
"The AD9877 meets these requirements, allowing customers to do what they do best - invest in the design of proprietary digital ASICs that drive their applications.
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It also leverages what we do best, providing the best analogue and mixed-signal solutions to the marketplace".
The AD9877 is a complete modem front-end interface on a single chip and provides the industry's most optimised feature set for reducing system cost.
It integrates a 232 MHz quadrature digital transmitter, a high-performance TxDAC digital-to-analogue convertor, a 12bit direct IF analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) in the receive path, and two 8bit convertors.
It provides the optimum feature set for reducing system costsuch as receiver IF sampling to 75MHz, and fine gain control in the transmit path (0.5dB steps from 0 to 7.5dB), it also provides a seamless interface to low-cost coarse gain cable drivers, such as the AD8322/27.
Additionally, the AD9877's subsampling ADCs have superior performance, reducing the number of down conversion stages required in many systems.
The AD9877 also features dual auxiliary 12bit sigma-delta DACs and programmable sampling clock rates.
The "smart partitioning" approach optimally segregates the mixed-signal portion of the signal chain from the large-scale digital processing to deliver high performance signal processing with minimum system cost.
Products in the MxFE family enable designers to take advantage of fine digital geometries to reduce digital ASIC cost - while allowing the high-performance, mixed-signal functions to reside on a process optimised for low cost, high performance analogue products.
Designers can use application-specific standard products such as the AD9877 MxFE to mitigate the cost, power consumption, and board space impact of multiple external ADCs and DACs, and to leverage their ASIC design resources.
"Smart partitioning" is the common design methodology for several currently available members of ADI's MxFE family.
The AD9875 and AD9876 target the home networking area.
The AD9875 is a low-cost integrated mixed signal transceiver for HPNA, and the AD9876 targets power line networking and VDSL.
The AD9873, ADI's first mixed-signal front end for set-top boxes and broadband communications, was released in November 2000.
Available today, the AD9877 is priced at $ 4.53 per unit in 100,000-piece quantities.
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