Project Led by Jacobs School Alum Honored at 2013 CES Show

A project led by Jacobs School alum Andre Berracasa is being recognized at the 2013 International CES show this week in Las Vegas. The MxL267 24-channel Full-Spectrum Capture (FSC™) cable receiver developed by MaxLinear Inc. has been named an International CES Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering Awards Honoree in the Embedded Technologies category. Berracasa is the System Lead for the project.

MxL267 is the first Full-Spectrum Capture device capable of simultaneously receiving any combination of 24 channels located arbitrarily inside the cable spectrum, according to a MaxLinear press release.

“The MxL267 deserves a CES Innovations Award because it is the key to the development of cable set-top boxes and gateways that give consumers all of the programming they want while minimizing power consumption and network maintenance costs for cable operators. The proof is in the success of the chip, which has enjoyed more than a dozen design wins by leading cable system manufacturers including ARRIS Group, Inc. in the first five months since the chip was launched,” says the award entry.

Berracasa  earned a bachelor's in computer engineering at UC San Diego in 1978, one of the first students to graduate with a degree in that major. He went on to work at Linkabit, Teledyne Ryan Electronics, ComStream and Carrier Comm before joining MaxLinear in June 2010.

The MxL267 he developed supports up to 1 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) download speeds when bonding all 24 channels together. This enables cable operators to leapfrog the standard download speeds of 300 Megabits per second (Mb/s) for home Internet service. With 24 channels in the MxL267, cable set-top boxes can support enough channels for multiple TVs, DVRs and simultaneous viewing of programming on multiple screens while still offering untouchable data download speeds.

The MaxLinear press release is available here.

A complete list of the Embedded Technologies  honorees is available here.