May 10, 2004 -- Altera Corp. and Broadband Physics have announced that Altera's programmable logic solutions enabled the implementation of Broadband Physics' Sub-band Division Multiplexing (SDM) technology to increase digital capacity from cable networks. SDM is a mathematical innovation that delivers up to three times the digital capacity and the lowest cost of transport compared to alternative cable broadband implementations including Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and Ultra Wideband (UWB).

Broadband Physics is bringing to market a new modulation called Sub-band Division Multiplexing (SDM). The company's SDM innovation provides a leap over existing technology by cost effectively releasing more digital capacity at higher performance from existing last-mile networks. The company is initially focused on cable networks. For cable, SDM's highest RF bandwidth efficiency combined with low implementation costs provides up to a 7x gain in value of digital transport capacity value gain for the cable operator. SDM increases head-end density (reduces footprint) and increases digital downstream rates in the set-top box and cable modem to speeds approaching 200-Mbps for the same cost as existing 30-42Mbps technologies.

Broadband Physics relied on Stratix FPGAs to deliver the performance required for this application, and also saved months of development time by taking advantage of the Stratix edition of Altera's DSP development kit. "We needed the highest-performance FPGAs to handle the mathematically-intensive SDM transforms and processing that are at the heart of this new technology," said Tracy Hall, Broadband Physics' director of systems engineering. "Not only did Stratix FPGAs deliver the DSP performance we needed, but we also cut our development time by at least a quarter and saved thousands of dollars in engineering costs by leveraging Altera's Stratix DSP development board and DSP MegaCore intellectual property functions."

Stratix FPGAs are employed by Broadband Physics in both their cable headend system that transmits signals across the cable, and in the demonstration set-top box that receives the data. The prototype systems include Stratix DSP development boards as part of the actual hardware implementation.