Entropic announces Digital Channel Stacking Switch (dCSS) ICs

Monday, April 21st, 2014
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Entropic Announces Industry’s Lowest Power, Smallest Size and Highest Performance Digital Channel Stacking Switch (dCSS) ICs for Worldwide Direct Broadcast Satellite Operators

  • World’s Lowest Power Outdoor Unit Solutions Deliver Approximately Half the Power of Competitive Solutions

SAN DIEGO — Building on its market leadership in the global Channel Stacking Switch (CSS) industry with over 100-million CSS chips deployed worldwide, Entropic (Nasdaq:ENTR), a world leader in semiconductor solutions for the connected home, today announced its latest digital Channel Stacking Switch (dCSS) and Band Translation integrated circuit (IC) family, the EN5500-series.

The EN5500-series is comprised of three configurations supporting Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) operator configurations worldwide:

  • EN5500, a six-input (250 – 2350 MHz), one-output, CSS-only IC;
  • EN5510, a seven-input (250 – 2350 MHz), three-output, CSS and dual-band/triple-band translation IC; and
  • EN5520, a four-input (250 – 2350 MHz), two-output, CSS and legacy IC.

Entropic’s use of advanced mixed-signal technology, including state-of-the-art multi GS/s broadband ADCs, DACs, and PLLs, coupled with efficient multirate DSP architectures for digital channelization and stacking, has enabled the Company to develop a family of highly-integrated dCSS solutions, with the world’s lowest power, most cost-optimized and smallest form factor when compared to competitive ODU products.

Key Benefits

Entropic’s EN5500-series offers the following benefits:

Lowest Power ODU IC: Entropic’s second-generation dCSS solutions offer breakthrough low power dissipation at approximately one-half the power of current competitive offerings and one-fourth the power of previous dCSS Gen1 solutions. Consequently, the EN5500-series can be directly powered from set-top boxes eliminating the need for costly external power inserters.

A Cost-Optimized System Approach: The highly-integrated solutions provide the industry’s smallest easy-to-assemble QFN packages with integrated microcontroller, FSK, DiSEqC, SPI and I2C support, which minimize the external Bill of Materials (BoM) to enable cost-effective ODU implementations by OEMs.

Leading-Edge Performance: The EN5500 product family delivers best-in-class Modulated Error Ratio (MER) performance under all scenarios. Proprietary mixed-signal calibration algorithms, crosstalk and spur mitigation techniques ensure reliable performance over a broad range of operating conditions, and as a result, provides immunity to process, voltage and temperature variance.

Enhanced User Bands: The EN5500-series supports 24 user bands in response to tier-one DBS operators’ requirements to support more tuner/demodulators as they migrate to gateway/client architectures. Additionally, operators can rapidly deploy single-wire hospitality and multi-dwelling unit (MDU) implementations that have high tuner count installation requirements.

“The introduction of Entropic’s EN5500-series dCSS product line underscores our commitment and investment in the global DBS market. As the market leader of single-wire DBS technology, with more than 100-million CSS chips deployed worldwide, no other company can claim to have implemented or understand the challenges associated with deploying operator-class single-wire applications like Entropic,” said Matt Rhodes, senior vice president, Global Marketing, Entropic. “We believe with our superior execution, low power and low cost, the EN5500-series is a single-wire ODU game-changer, enabling operators to achieve long-term reliability and cost savings.”

Product Availability

Entropic is currently sampling the EN5500, EN5510 and EN5520.