At the ANGA COM 2015 Exhibition & Congress for Broadband, Cable and Satellite in Cologne, Germany (9-11 June), Anadigics Inc of Warren, NJ, USA has introduced the ARA2031 reverse-path amplifier, which delivers optimized performance for DOCSIS 3.1 customer premises equipment (CPE) devices including cable modems and gateways.
According to Infonetics Research, from fourth-quarter 2011 to third-quarter 2014 cumulative global shipments of DOCSIS 3.0 CPE devices reached nearly 90 million units. The new DOCSIS 3.1 standard leverages an expanded frequency range and new signal modulation scheme to improve network efficiency, which enables MSOs to offer a wider array of multimedia services and dramatically faster data speeds.
The new ARA2031 reverse-path amplifier offers high output power and linearity over the full 204MHz frequency band. This level of performance supports two OFDM-A 96MHz wide upstream channels, as specified by DOCSIS 3.1, enabling CATV MSOs to offer gigabit upload speeds for the first time.
"High-speed Internet subscribers continue to crave greater upload data speeds as content creation dramatically increases," says James Martin, senior business development director of Infrastructure Products. "Our new reverse-path amplifier provides the industry's best combination of output power and linearity over the expanded 204MHz upstream operating band to help MSOs capitalize on this trend and compete with fiber-to-the-home networks," he claims.
The ARA2031 leverages the firm's proven gallium arsenide (GaAs) MESFET technology and patent-pending design architectures to provide what is claimed to be the highest output power, lowest distortion and lowest noise in its class. Operating over a wide frequency range of 5-204MHz, the reverse-path amplifier provides 3dB of margin to the DOCSIS 3.1 requirements for harmonic performance and distortion at an operating output level of +68dBmV. Supplied in a compact 7mm x 7mm 48-pin QFN package, the robust amplifier also includes a digitally controlled precision step attenuator that provides up to 60dB of attenuation in 1dB increments. The performance eliminates uncorrectable bit errors for ultra-fast, ultra-reliable data transmission, the firm says.
