Freshly public TV chip designer MaxLinear picked up another major customer for its CMOS TV tuner in the form of Arris the US cable equipment supplier, who will use the MxL241SF tuner and demodulator in a future series of DOCSIS 3.0 products.
Arris as a significant supplier to the cable community on both sides of the Atlantic, represents a second major win for the new CMOS tuner technology from MaxLinear, with it previously picking up Netgem, the French IPTV set top company which plans to put them in hybrid DVB-T tuners, mostly in Europe.
The novel application for these tuners in the Arris products is to resolve data channels in DOCSIS 3.0 rather than to simply tune to cable TV channels. The MaxLinear’s MxL241SF comes as a 6mm x 6mm 40-pin QFN package which consumes just 450mW of power. Using four of these means the gateways can deliver up to two 96 MHz slices. So if that’s four chips for each DOCSIS 3.0 modem shipped, that should lead to a lot of chip shipments for MaxLinear, given Arris ships over 1 million DOCSIS modems each quarter and that’s not counting using them in Cable Modem Termination Systems.
MaxLinear claims that this design came about because it helps DOCSIS gateways hit power consumption targets for Energy Star and other certifications. The tuner can also allow for a single-tuner low power mode which lets customers make VoIP phone calls during power outages, under battery power ‘ which in turn helps Arris meet MSO requirements for up time and standby time.
MaxLinear results came out this week and won’t factor in either of these Netgem and Arris deals, but produced revenues for the second quarter of $18.2 million, up 13% sequentially and a 63% rise over the $11.2 million reported in the second quarter. Net income was $1.8 million compared to net income of $1.3 million in the first quarter, and just $153,000 in Q2 2009.
Despite raising net proceeds of $72.9 million in its IPO, MaxLinear was cash positive for the quarter. The company said that it saw increases in shipments to the Cable, Digital Television, and Automotive markets, by which we assume he means offering Mobile TV to cars in Japan, where much of its revenues comes from.