STMicroelectronics Announces Volume Production of Industry-Unique Satellite Demodulator with Lead Customer Newtec

a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, today announced the volume production of the world’s first 500Mbaud High Symbol Rate (HSR) integrated tuner-demodulator chip, selected by its lead customer Newtec, a specialist in designing, developing, and manufacturing equipment and technologies for satellite communications.

Designed to increase bandwidth-usage efficiency and throughput in high-end satellite and hybrid broadband-broadcast applications, the STiD135 demodulator supports the DVB-S2, DVB-S2X, and DVB-S2 Annex-M^[1] standards and is intended to complement terrestrial networks to provide a performance equivalent to fiber-optic links, taking advantage of the universal accessibility of satellite signals.

Newtec will use the STiD135 in its wideband VSAT modem portfolio. The Newtec MDM2210 IP Satellite Modem, which is the latest addition to the Newtec Dialog^®multiservice platform, is the first-ever VSAT^[2] modem on the market supporting 500Mbaud forward carriers with DVB-S2X.

“The long-term cooperation with our lead customer Newtec has now resulted in bringing the unique capabilities of our satellite demodulator to the market,” said Jocelyne Garnier, Group VP, General Manager, Aerospace, Defense, and Legacy Division, STMicroelectronics. “When designing the chip, we took into account the market’s demands and worked with many partners, including CNES, the French Space Agency.”

“We are delighted to cooperate with ST, which, as far as we are concerned, provides the only chip available on the market capable of handling such high rates, the likes of which are enabled by our new wideband modems,” said Frederik Simoens, Chief Technology Officer at Newtec. “The cooperation will make our products the first on the market to support 500Mbaud forward carriers with DVB-S2X, guaranteeing our customers the highest performance and efficiencies.”

The ST chip implements quad full-band tuners, dual HSR demodulators with up to eight narrow-band demodulators, and provides hardware support for Network Clock Recovery (NCR). It optimizes the use of Ka-band and multi-spot beam technology carried by the latest High-Throughput Satellites (HTS) by enabling single-carrier usage of these transponders. This delivers a 30% increase in channel efficiency over multi-carrier solutions.

The STiD135 is capable of demodulating two independent wide-band carriers and up to eight narrow-band carriers providing the capability to simultaneously receive high throughput data whilst receiving multiple broadcast channels, useful for example, in hybrid broadband-broadcast systems. The total useful data throughput is over 600Mbits per second, furthermore the on-chip data filtering ensures that only the wanted bits need be sent for further processing in the host system.

The design took into full account the demands of the market for low power and extended temperature range increasing the scope and application of the device to include out-door units, Smart LNBs, hybrid broadband-broadcast home gateways, VSAT terminals, small home-office modems, mobile platforms, data center modems, and so on.

The STiD135 demodulator chip is now in production and will be available for mass-market deployment by May 2017. Further information is available on www.ST.com and under NDA.