Broadband communications ICs: enabling high-bandwidth connectivity in the home and office

Ubiquitous broadband connectivity has been the "Holy Grail" of the telecommunications industry for decades. Broadband communications is generally defined as those services operating at data rates in excess of 1.5 Mb/s. The most common broadband service in use today is known as T-1 which operates at 1.544 Mb/s. However, due to the high cost, it is available almost exclusively to businesses. The most common residential digital telecommunications service available today is Internet access via voiceband modems. These "narrowband" connections are limited to maximum data rates of 56 kb/s. The principal roadblock to the widespread deployment of broadband services has been cost. While the theoretical foundations of broadband digital communications have been well-known for many decades, there has not been, until relatively recently, any practical way to implement the sophisticated signal processing algorithms necessary to build transceivers that could operate robustly over the relatively poor quality "last-mile" communications channels. The availability of low-cost deep-submicron CMOS technologies makes it possible to put the necessary signal processing horsepower on a single chip, and as a result is the key enabler of the entire broadband communications industry.