News and New Products

Silicon foundations simplify assembly lines

By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor -- EDN, 2/1/2007

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Two consecutive press briefings at January’s Consumer Electronics Show dealt with different products for different markets but delivered a similar message: that by migrating from a traditional approach comprising numerous discrete components to an integrated one based on silicon building blocks, you can not only potentially improve your end-system specifications, but also dramatically simplify, boost the yield, and reduce the cost of your system-manufacturing flow.

In the first briefing, Xceive unveiled its XC5000 broadcast receiver for NTSC (National Television System Committee), ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee), QAM (quadrature-amplitude-modulated) digital cable, DMB-TH (digital multimedia broadcast-terrestrial/handheld) DVB-C (digital video broadcast-cable), DVB-T (DVB-terrestrial), and ISDB (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting). Although the company fabricates this $6 (100,000-per-month) device on a nonstandard silicon germanium BiCMOS process, Xceive has to date elected to go this route so that its products will deliver equal to or better reception performance than a traditional can tuner (see table). Other notable specifications for the XC5000 include 5-msec-per-channel signal detection and package dimensions of 7×7×0.85 mm. (Stack that up against a bulky can alternative!)

Because the XC5000 is software-configurable to support a wide range of worldwide broadcast parameters, it can single-handedly replace more than 30 geography-specific can-tuner configurations. (Xceive accomplished this task with one customer’s television design.)

The XC5000’s silicon foundation also leads to decreased unit-to-unit SNR variability and superior frequency response linearity versus can tuners (see graph). And, as conventional CMOS processes improve, Xceive will regularly revisit a course correction in that even-more-cost-effective-fabrication direction.

In the second briefing, Silicon Labs introduced its CMOS-based $4.87 (10,000) Si4730 and $5.53 (10,000) Si4731 AM/FM receivers; the 4732 also incorporates support for the European RDS (Radio Data System) and US RBDS (Radio Broadcast Data System), which enable display of data such as the station ID and song name (see figure). The devices’ common 3×3-mm, 20-pin QFN (quad-flat-no-lead) package translates to an estimate of at least 90% reduced board area than a conventional discrete-assembled AM/FM receiver consumes, a particularly vital attribute in highly integrated, small-form-factor mobile electronics devices, such as Microsoft’s Zune. And some of the conventional receivers Silicon Labs showed were also assembly horror stories, comprising temperature- and age-sensitive components, such as hand-wound inductors and hand-tuned potentiometers. Conversely, the Si4730 and Si4731 are, like the earlier-described XC5000, software-configurable to support worldwide radio-broadcast parameters and capable of delivering consistently superior reception results.

XC5000			CAN Tuner
Noise Figure	less than 6 dB	Better sensitivity	approximately 8 dB	European, Japanese CAN
Phase Noise	less than –97 dBc @10KHz less than –106 dBc @ 100KHz less than –118 dBc @ 1MHz	Low error rate at high symbol rate	less than –85 dBc @ 10KHz	TDA6650/1 @ Hybrid mode
SNR	less than 53 dB	Noise free, clear analog picture	approximately  48 dB	Typical European, Japanese CAN