Broadcom wins Sci-Atlanta set-top deal

Scientific-Atlanta is to buy a minimum of 500,000 digital communication ICs from Broadcom Corporation, for use in the company's next generation set-top boxes. Deliveries of the ICs, which will only account for an unspecified percentage of Sci-Atlanta's requirements, will take place during 1999 and will be used in production units for sale in 2000. According to Sci-Atlanta they'll go into the company's Digital Interactive Network and Explorer 2000 (possible trademark problem here, boys) digital set-top terminals. The company claims to have chalked up a goodly number of cable companies as customers for these, and as the unit requirements of these should ultimately run into tens of millions, we can speculate that the Broadcom contract is simply part of a plan to run a pilot of a million or two deployments over 2000. The two companies however say they are co-operating to integrate the communications functions for the Explorer 2000 into a single VLSI chip, so they're obviously still trying to get the cost down. ® Click for more stories