Burr-Brown IC's advance HDSL applications.

TUCSON, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 1, 1996--Burr-Brown Corp. (NASDAQ:BBRC) has announced a new family of Analog Front-End (AFE) chips that put the company at the forefront of the rapidly expanding market for high speed digital subscriber lines.

The company's new AFE1103, AFE1104, and AFE1105 are the first members of a family of single-chip solutions that greatly reduce the size, cost and power requirements of an E1/T1 rate HDSL or MDSL system by providing, in one chip, all the active mixed signal circuitry needed to connect a digital signal processor (bit pump) to the existing telephone company twisted pair infrastructure.

HDSL and MDSL are High-bit-rate and Medium-speed Digital Subscriber Line systems. HDSL is widely used today by telephone companies to lower the cost of implementing standard T1 and E1 connections for businesses and is in trials for residential applications.

These AFE chips use state-of-the-art submicron CMOS mixed signal design technology to replace multi-chip discrete solutions thus lowering HDSL system power, size, and cost. This technology allows telephone companies to cost effectively serve the bandwidth needs of applications such as Internet access, video conferencing, SOHO (small office, home office) and video phones.

By designing for full compliance with Bellcore and ETSI standards, the AFEs were introduced production ready for existing systems and chip sets from PairGain Technologies, Brooktree, and Metalink and are in volume production now.

Ben Itri, chief technical officer at PairGain Technologies, said, "The AFE1104 provides a low-cost integrated solution for HDSL analog front-ends. The AFE1104 enables a wide variety of new business and residential HDSL applications due to its rate scaleability, low power dissipation, single supply operation and small form factor. Burr-Brown has clearly shown that they are at the leading edge of IC technology for state-of-the-art communications systems such at xDSL."

Functionally, these units are composed of transmit and receive sections. The transmit section generates, filters, and buffers outgoing 2B1Q data. The receive section filters, digitizes, and echo cancels the symbol data received on the telephone line and passes it to the DSP.

These AFE devices feature a scaleable data rate to allow operation over a range of 196kbps to 1.168Mbps. The transmit and receive filter responses of the AFE devices change automatically with clock frequency. AFE family key specifications include scaleable data rate, small surface mount package, 250mW power dissipation, +5V single power supply, and operation over the minus 40 C to 85 C temperature range.

Each of these units is packaged in a 48-pin SSOP and is priced from $13.40 in 10,000s. Delivery of the AFE1103, AFE1104, AFE1105 is from stock.

Burr-Brown Corp. develops, manufactures, and markets a broad line of high-performance, standard analog and mixed signal integrated circuits used in the processing of electronic signals. The products are used in a wide range of markets and applications, including communications, industrial and process control, test and measurement, medical and scientific instrumentation, medical imaging, digital audio and video, personal computers, and multimedia.

For additional information, call Mike Pawlik at 800/548-6132, Burr-Brown Corp., P.O. Box 11400, Tucson, AZ, 85734 or e-mail at [e-mail].

CONTACT: Burr-Brown Corp., Tucson

Mike Pawlik, 800/548-6132