Full Band Capture Could Dive IP Emigration For Line Operators

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Jun 27, 2011 4:53 PM, By Philip Hunter

The new statement by silicon creator Broadcom that it has burst the complaint of capturing and digitising the whole line TV spectrum in a singular fragment could lead to marked down expenses for line TV operators and accelerate their emigration to all-IP delivery. It will discard the need for multi-part tuners to offer a few channels at once inside of the home and will moreover separate power consumption, according to Broadcom. Another advantage, that would request similarly to any successive deployment of Full Band Capture by any other vendor, is deployment flexibility, in that the demodulator can melody to any magnitude when it wants without being restricted.

For consumers, the principal value of FBC, detached maybe from descend cost gateways and other home placement products, lies in faster duct change. Currently it can take 2 seconds or more to change channels on digital line services, since the check whilst tuners retune to a not similar magnitude and beginning to demodulate the data. FBC creates this roughly real-time because the whole rope is all the time being digitised on the fly and is entirely ready for display.

Currently, tuners home in on the magnitude rope for a specified channel, that is 8MHz far-reaching in Europe, and then demodulate the signals to remove the digital video stream. Alternatively, a DOCSIS gateway would remove IP packets from multi-part connected channels.

With FBC, the full demodulated digitised river travelling the whole line spectrum is presented to the STB or some gateway, that can then choose the preferred information or IP packets. Tuning then becomes an in-chip function, achieved at lightning speed in a singular SOC. At a cadence it solves the tuner proliferation problem, that has in jeopardy to travel expenses as homes with a few TVs and other gadgets can need up to 5 or 6 of them. With FBC, gadgets such as tablets and mobile phones can access digital TV services without requiring some STB-based tuner function.

There is moreover an value for DOCSIS 3.0 services, that with duct fastening requires access to up to 8 channels simultaneously. This has been addressed by wideband tuners that enable a singular analog tuner to access and then demodulate up to 8 channels inside of a 100MHz range. But whilst this reduces the number of analog tuners required, it places parsimonious stipulations on the magnitude apportionment of the DOCSIS 3.0 services. Furthermore it cannot be used for announce video services, because these may be located wherever inside of the 1GHz line spectrum. A wideband network with announce video would thus still need 4 eccentric wideband tuners to access 4 channels located wherever in spectrum.

It is moreover worth observant that the line spectrum of up to 1GHz is not a washed slate, but is already often cluttered, with assorted stipulations over apportionment of bandwidth, such as bequest analog broadcasts, and bequest boxes that cannot access all magnitude ranges. These stipulations bring to a halt serviceable frequencies for new value-added services such as broadband, VOD and extra digital announce channels. Operators pick to be able to location DOCSIS and announce services wherever in their spectrum without constraints over adjoining channels, so that they can bucket change assorted services and give consumers with the limit choices. With FBC, the whole spectrum then becomes right away existing in a adjustable way, with no imprisonment at all over access. The whole spectrum becomes a river of digital information that may be accessed randomly.

Indeed, implementing FBC is a digital to equivalent term conversion exercise, and only became probable with the appearance of the ultimate 40nm fragment technology, according to Broadcom. By compressing the geometry, signals have reduction far to travel inside of the chip, shortening latency and creation it probable to fill up all the vigilance estimate operations compulsory for FBC in a singular SoC.

Broadcom's FBC is now existing in 3 SoC systems, its 40nm 8-QAM BCM3128 and 4-QAM BCM3124 line multireceiver SoCs, and the 400 Mbps BCM3383 Euro/DOCSIS 3.0 line gateways.