Microtune enters cable-telephony space

Silicon and tuner vendor Microtune has turned its attention to the cable-telephony space with a radio frequency (RF) home gateway that, when integrated into a network interface unit (NIU), delivers integrated voice, video and data services via broadband networks.

The gateway uses Microtune’s silicon products and technology, as well as its module system design expertise. It “is essentially geared for switch-based cable telephony products, but it’s also designed to meet the DOCSIS (packetized) requirements for future growth as well,” said Jim Fontaine, Microtune’s president.

Microtune sells the RF components to companies building cable-telephony interfaces that are attached to consumer premises.

“We sell the RF NIU, a module about the size of a dollar bill, with two F connectors, one input and one output,” said Fontaine. “The idea is to tap into that cable line that goes to your modems, your analog and digital set-top boxes with absolutely minimal insertion loss.

The units overcome four “challenges,” Fontaine continued. “One is performance. Another is insertion loss.”

It must also reduce the power consumption needs dramatically, he said.

“We’re talking milliwatt budgets,” he said, noting that a nightlight consumes 4 to 6 watts and “whether the NIU has 1 watt or 2 watts is dramatically important, because an extra watt times 10,000 customers is 10,00 watts of powering you have to supply through a cable system, and they don’t want that.”

The fourth challenge--UL regulatory issues for lightning protection and other power outage possibilities--was something new for Microtune, which is used to making tuners for television sets and set-top boxes, he said.

Microtune is coming into a relatively new field, as far as competition is concerned, Fontaine said, although he expects the competition to grow as the cable-telephony space expands.

“The only competition right now is internal development (by the vendors who make entire NIUs),” he said. “They’ve been doing their own stuff for years. As they start to deploy this, they have to get the costs down” and thus would be willing to outsource to “a manufacturer like us to come in and cut their loss.”

Production of the NIU components will begin in the second half of the year, with costs about $35 per 10,000 units, he said.