Satellite front end is fully integrated circuit

The first product in the SiRX product family is the industry's first fully integrated single-chip satellite RF front-end for direct broadcast satellite.

Silicon Laboratories has announced the first product in its SiRX product family, the industry's first fully integrated single-chip satellite RF front-end for direct broadcast satellite (DBS).

Offering the highest performance, smallest size and easiest-to-use receiver solution for DBS, the Si21xx devices are ideal for all free-to-air (FTA) and pay-TV DBS equipment including satellite set-top boxes, PC cards for satellite TV, DBS receivers for automotive or avionic use, DVD recorders and digital TVs with integrated satellite receivers.

Leveraging Silicon Laboratories' world-class RF expertise in CMOS and building on the company's unique intellectual property for minimising digital-to-analogue crosstalk, the SiRX satellite RF front end integrates a high-performance satellite L-band RF tuner, a dual-mode DVB-S/DSS digital demodulator and a power-efficient, step-up supply controller for the low-noise block convertor (LNB) into a single 6 x 8mm CMOS solution.

The integration of the LNB supply controller is an industry-first and includes support for DiSEqC 2.x and legacy tone/voltage LNB signalling.

The SiRX devices also support an on-chip hardware blindscan feature that improves channel scan time by a factor of 10 when compared with many existing solutions.

This feature radically reduces set-top box installation time for FTA applications where channel locations are unknown.

"With more than 65 million DBS receivers expected to ship in 2006, satellite television is a large and growing market where OEMs are facing pressure to integrate more value-added features", said Michelle Abraham, Principal Analyst of In-Stat.

"The integration of the complete front-end satellite receiver onto a single-chip eliminates the difficulty of analogue RF design for satellite set-top box designers".

"This integration has the potential to improve performance as well as reduce system cost and design time so that equipment manufacturers can focus their efforts on integrating higher-value features into their products".

The SiRX family provides best-in-class performance, meeting or exceeding key RF front-end requirements such as sensitivity, intermodulation distortion, receiver implementation loss and LNB peripheral support.

The integration of the tuner, demodulator and LNB supply functions eliminates the need for external signalling among three separate ICs, which greatly simplifies the required software-programming overhead as well as the number of board signal traces typical of competing solutions.

The single-chip RF-to-digital architecture of the SiRX satellite RF front-end family reduces design time and allows an easy conversion from terrestrial or cable reception to satellite reception for existing designs.

"By leveraging Silicon Laboratories mixed-signal RF expertise, we are uniquely positioned to deliver a highly-integrated RF solution to address the needs of DBS equipment makers", said Dave Bresemann, Vice President of Silicon Laboratories.

"The satellite broadcast market is a large opportunity for the company with many difficult RF challenges where we can bring our expertise to bear to provide substantial improvements in system cost and performance".

Samples of the SiRX family are available now in a 6 x 8mm, lead-free, RoHS compliant 44-pin QFN package with full production in the second quarter of 2006.

Pricing for the Si21xx devices starts at $7.37 in quantities of 1000.

Silicon Laboratories also provides an evaluation board with the recommended design and layout for $150.

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