CES Chips and Salsa

A fair bit of the tech news coming out of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week had less to do with finished products than the components - particularly chips - used to make them. DOCSIS 3.1 and reference designs figured strongly.

• MACOM announced a new portfolio of passive components for DOCSIS 3.1 compliant cable TV and broadband Internet systems. The new product family includes upstream and downstream transformers/baluns, couplers and power dividers/combiners.
• Broadcom (NASDAQ:BRCM) announced a DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem system-on-a-chip (SoC) and a cable modem reference design. The BCM3390 cable modem SoC is designed to support IP video and data rates exceeding 1 Gbps. The BCM93390 modem reference design with integrated WiFi is designed to provide up to 2 Gbps speeds in the home.
• ViXS Systems (TSX:VXS) showcased a suite of network video processing and streaming technologies, including 12-bit color depth, high dynamic range (HDR) video processing, high frame rate (HFR) video decoding, multi-stream transcoding, video over IP streaming/distribution, OTT and user generated content.
• Entropic (NASDAQ:ENTR) focused on MoCA 2.0 technologies. The company introduced two reference designs: a USB power and data adapter reference design for whole-home networking for HD and UltraHD/4K video and streaming media services; and a collaboration with Qualcomm Atheros on a home networking reference design for whole-home wireless coverage.