TV Tuners Reduce Part Count

The BCM3415 is reportedly the world's first complete digital-analog RF television tuner in CMOS. The tuner chip is the first in the BCM3400 family of tuner products that will enable manufacturers to use a single tuner chip to replace current tuner designs that incorporate up to 200 discrete components, housed in bulky VHF/UHF tuner "cans." The tuner integrates all of the signal processing circuits required to select a requested channel anywhere in the 50 - 860 MHz cable band, amplify it and down convert it to a standard 44 MHz intermediate frequency. The output of this CMOS tuner can be fed into a variety of demodulators for different applications. All of the parameters of each chip are controlled by a two-wire serial interface that is MBus compatible. The IC is packaged in a 48-pin TQFP and is priced at $10 in sample quantities.