Broadband digitization for cable tuners front-end

Abstract : The RF front-end for forthcoming broadband receivers of cable modems is investigated. The aim is the digitization of the whole RF cable input spectrum, which spreads from 50MHz to 1GHz. In this paper, several architectures are proposed and evaluated. We introduce a general cost function in order to compare these proposals. We verify that the complete digitization of the cable input spectrum is a challenging problem, and show that a solution based on analytic signals and downconversion is promising.