Motorola Inc has announced a new concept in front ends for television set-top box devices that enables modules to be interchanged so that the same boxes can be used for satellite, cable and terrestrial television services. It is using a concept known as Direct Conversion Receiver which the company said reduces the number of components of traditional tuners and front-end semiconductor products to about one quarter and reduces the manufacturers’ dependency on multiple suppliers. The company’s Semiconductor Products division last week announced the satellite and cable front-end modules for set-top boxes. The MC92390 and MC92391 modules for cable and satellite respectively consist of a Direct Conversion Receiver together with a digital demodulator and forward error correcting circuits. It is designed to take a radio frequency input and to output an MPEG 2 transport stream to the remainder of the system. The modules have been designed with Motorola silicon to provide an integration path for the BiCMOS analog front-end and CMOS digital demodulation circuits, the company said. The MC92390 module comprises a Digital Video Broadcast cable television-compliant front end with DCR and Synthesizer together with analog-to-digital 64QAM dem odulator, and Reed Solomon forward error correction device with de-interleaver and energy dispersal services.
