Broadcom Delivers World's First Single Chip for Cable-TV Set-Top Boxes; Pioneer and Pace Adopt Broadcom's Breakthrough Technology for Time Warner Applications - Broadcom BCM7100 - Product Announcement

Cambridge Telcom Report, May 15, 2000

Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq:BRCM), the leading provider of integrated circuits enabling broadband communications to and throughout the home and business, continues its leadership position in cable set-top box technology with the announcement Monday of the world's first single-chip solution for cable set-top boxes that can be used in cable systems worldwide.

Set-top box and television manufacturers now have the most integrated solution ever developed to allow them to support cable television systems for North America, Europe and Japan. This full-featured, single-chip, analog and digital video cable set-top box solution merges four Broadcom chips into one, thereby dramatically reducing the overall system cost for next-generation set-top boxes.

Pioneer Digital Technologies and Pace Micro Technology plc, who are developing set-top boxes for use by Time Warner, have selected Broadcom's new single-chip set-top solution for their two-way digital cable-TV interactive set-top boxes. These design wins reinforce Broadcom's position as the leading provider of set-top box chips for the global digital cable-TV market.

"The Broadcom BCM7100 is a significant milestone in the evolution of the set-top box market," said Henry T. Nicholas III, Broadcom's President and CEO. "With improved performance, new feature additions and component integration, the BCM7100 clearly provides the cable TV industry with a level of integration and performance that is unparalleled. Our ability to successfully combine these core technologies together into one chip now makes it economically feasible for the wide-scale deployment of digital set-top boxes."

"Broadcom's continued effort toward higher silicon integration is allowing us to develop digital cable set-top boxes that are in line with our consumer home entertainment strategy for the retail channel," said Tim Takahashi, President of Pioneer Digital Technologies. "Broadcom's breakthrough technology will reduce the manufacturing time and cost of our cable set-top box products while providing a superior look and feel for the user interface compared to existing products."

"Technological innovation and speed to market has enabled Pace to maintain a leading position within the digital cable set-top box market," said Malcolm Miller, President and CEO of Pace Micro Technology. "And so we value and enthusiastically welcome Broadcom's single-chip solution as we recognize the enormous benefits it will bring to Pace's digital cable customer, Time Warner Cable in the USA and to our other digital cable operators worldwide."

"Pace will provide a powerful, high specification digital interactive solution for Time Warner Cable's second-generation cable set-top box. By integrating Broadcom's chip, Pace will increase even further the speed of the set-top box, making channel changing and interactive services faster, and providing video on demand, e-commerce and games services for Time Warner Cable's customers."

"Time Warner is committed to a more competitive market place and the development of the BCM7100 is a clear indication that our strategy is working," said Mike Hayashi, Vice President, Advanced Engineering for Time Warner Cable. "This is the first implementation of the Time Warner Pegasus Specification that does not require our suppliers to source chips from the proprietary conditional access vendors."

The BCM7100 is a complete cable set-top box system-on-a-chip including the front-end, back-end, CPU, system control and peripherals. Front-end technology includes an in-band QAM demodulator, an out-of-band demodulator, and an upstream burst modulator. The back-end technology includes an MPEG2 video decoder, audio decoder, transport engine, advanced 2D/3D graphics controller and an analog NTSC decoder/encoder. The integrated CPU is a MIPs RISC microprocessor and the interactive system controller is a DAVIC Media Access Controller (MAC). Peripheral functions include ISO7816 Smart Cards for e-commerce, UARTs, counter/timers, IR Tx/Rx, a POD interface, general-purpose I/O, an IRDA interface and SPI/I2C controllers.

Broadcom is also announcing Monday the BCM93710 low-cost Set-Top Box Reference Platform, which is based on the BCM7100 chip. The reference design includes all software drivers as source code along with board level schematics and gerber files. The design also incorporates Broadcom's iLine10 HomePNA 2.0 home networking chip set, capable of 10 Mbps transmission of voice, video and data over existing standard telephone lines. POD and Smart Card interfaces are included to support common conditional access systems. PowerTV and Broadcom have collaborated in porting the PowerTV operating system to this platform to accelerate customers' time-to-market. Broadcom will be demonstrating this new set-top box reference design at the National Cable Television Association's tradeshow in New Orleans this week.

The BCM7100 is packaged in a 420-pin TBGA. It is priced at $50 in 100K quantities and is available today.