ACADEMIA

Mindspeed Technologies has announced that it is demonstrating a wide variety of high-definition (HD) video semiconductor solutions for broadcast-station equipment and the fiber-access infrastructure at the IBC 2010 Show, September 10-14, 2010, in Hall 10, Stand F39, at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam.

"Mindspeed products are playing a key role in helping the industry move to higher-bandwidth standards as user demand for on-line content turns video into the biggest driver of IP bandwidth growth, worldwide," said Kurt Busch, senior vice president and general manager of the high-performance analog business unit at Mindspeed. "We are demonstrating a wide variety of products at IBC 2010 that make it easier for larger broadcasters and service providers to create, transmit and deliver content."

Featured products at Mindspeed's IBC booth include the company's recently introduced M21170 crosspoint switch, which replaces four cascaded 144x144 crosspoints to create a 288x288 non-blocking matrix for a router's switching core. Quadrupling the core matrix doubles available switching capacity, enabling users to route significantly higher numbers of serial data streams while significantly reducing the size, cost and complexity of today's largest optical transport switches and broadcast video routing switchers.

Customers for Mindspeed's M21170 crosspoint switch include Utah Scientific, which is using the device in its new UTAH-400 Series2 288R router.

"We considered a number of crosspoint switch options for our UTAH-400 Series2 288R router and finally settled on the Mindspeed device because of its efficient use of power and space," said Tom Harmon, president and CEO of Utah Scientific. "We are very pleased with the capabilities of the M21170, which are certainly reflected in the superb performance delivered by our Series2 288R router."

Mindspeed will also be demonstrating its M21004 2x2 switch and equalizer for long printed circuit board and backplane traces. The 2x2 non-blocking crosspoint switch is optimized for Serial Digital Interface (SDI) applications, and has the capability to run up to 3.2Gbps. At 36mW per channel, the M21004 offers versatility by including integrated trace equalization at the input, plus output de-emphasis, isolated input and output supply voltages, as well as an on-chip regulator.

Other demonstrations include:

-- Low-Power (SDI) Cascaded Transmission: Mindspeed is showing its 144x144 crosspoint switch and low-power SDI components performing error-free transmission of the same video signal during multiple passes through a real-world SDI routing switcher application, consisting of an input/output and switch cards, along with an industry-standard backplane.

-- Optical SDI Transmission: Mindspeed is showcasing its family of optical physical media devices (PMDs), including laser drivers, receiver optical subassembly (ROSA) components and limiting amplifiers, as they transmit 3Gbps-SDI (3G-SDI) data across a 30-kilometer optical fiber link.

-- High-Speed Integrity and Switching Solutions: Also on display are Mindspeed's comprehensive crosspoint and signal integrity solutions.