MaxLinear SoC chips enable network independent home gateway
Date: 23/09/2022
With the growth of usage of home gateways in homes for watching streaming media, usage of non-internet cable set-top box is drastically dropping to very low levels. In this consumer electronics market trend, there is a need to have network independent home gateways.
The leading digital/Internet driven consumer-electronics System on Chip developer MaxLinear has made available SOC chips for home gateways where they can connect to any of the high-speed networks such as:
1. GPON, XGS-PON, 10G EPON, Active Ethernet optical fibre networks
2. Copper based cable networks such as Xdsl, G. Fast, and DOCSIS
3.Wireless networks of type 5G FWA, Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7
4. And others including Ethernet 2.5G and 10G, G.hn, MoCA, Voice FX
The Three new SOC chips are codenamed as MxL25641, URX850, and URX851. OEMs and ODMs designing home gateways are given ultra-scalable architecture through this chips so that they can come out with a single versatile product for service providers such as cable, telco, and wireless.
MaxLinear claims these chips are designed to reduce the development time and bring down the cost of ownership. The another key feature of these chips is companies can design multiple high-speed data access gateway products with a common software framework. These chips support softwares such as prplOS (formerly prplWRT), RDK-B, and MaxLinear UGW. MaxLinear AnyWAN MxL25641, URX850, and URX851 are also power-efficient and reduces supply chain challenges, offering higher return on investment with reduced development costs, and faster deployment of products..
“To be successful in increasingly competitive broadband markets, service providers will need to streamline their home routers and gateways to ensure quick subscriber-turn-up and minimize supply chain impacts,” said Jeff Heynen, VP, Broadband Access and Home Networking at Dell ‘Oro. “Relying on a platform that supports multiple access technologies and in-home software frameworks will be critical to growing broadband subscribers and ensuring high quality of experience.”
“With over 20 years of experience delivering Access products at scale, MaxLinear understands our customers' demands for raw throughput, power, and value,” said Will Torgerson, vice president and general manager, Broadband group for MaxLinear. “The challenge for most operators is CAPEX cost. AnyWAN is the solution. When upgrading networks to bring multi-gig solutions to consumers, our products provide the best throughput supporting RDK or PRPL middleware standards, the latest Wi-Fi CERTIFIED and Ethernet connections, and interfaces to any WAN.”
While these chips pack ample streamed packet processing ability to take over the processing load from CPUs, they also smartly manage Power consumption by dynamically adjusting the consumption current to the required performance.
MaxLinear states in its release that "These innovative AnyWAN broadband SoCs offload all routine networking traffic which frees up the CPU to perform software-centric and virtualized services—enabling, for the first time, edge computing capabilities on home gateways. "
The company is making available reference designs/systems, sample chips, and the software (RDK and Open WRT-based SDK) immediately.
More information can be found at: www.maxlinear.com/AnyWAN.
