RFMD, a global leader in the design and manufacture of high-performance radio frequency solutions, announced that its Gallium Nitride (GaN) amplifier family for the new DOCSIS 3.1 CATV networking standard has won the CableFAX Tech Award for Green Technology. CableFAX's Green Technology Award recognizes technology that helps cable companies and program distributors cut energy consumption in equipment installed at the headend and/or in equipment distributed to residential and business customers. RFMD was recognized during the CableFAX Digital and Tech Awards ceremony held last week at the Yale Club in New York City.

RFMD's industry-leading GaN-based amplifier products offer superior performance and greatly improve the power efficiency of today's CATV systems supporting DOCSIS 3.1, reducing current consumption by as much as 20% compared to competing gallium arsenide- (GaAs-) and silicon-based amplifiers. Beyond power savings, the use of RFMD's GaN technology greatly reduces material waste and the energy needed to produce line amplifiers made from either GaAs or silicon. In fact, a single GaN amplifier replaces 16 silicon-based amplifiers or two GaAs amplifiers.

"This award is a tribute to RFMD's CATV hybrid amplifier team and to the power and space savings offered by the new GaN amplifier family they developed, which is helping customers upgrade equipment for the next generation of cable networking," said Norm Hilgendorf, president of RFMD's Multi-Market Products Group. "We continue to advance the state of the art of GaN technology and are proud to accept this prestigious award from CableFAX, which recognizes the green benefits of our newest GaN product family for CATV."

 RFMD's GaN family for DOCSIS 3.1 includes the RFCM4363 push-pull amplifier, RFCM3316 power doubler amplifier, and RFPD2580 hybrid power doubler amplifier. DOCSIS 3.1 increases effective downstream data rates from 160 Megabits per second (Mb/s) to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbit/s), and upstream data rates from 120 Mb/s to 1 Gbit/s when compared to DOCSIS 3.0. DOCSIS 3.1 extends CATV frequencies from 1 GHz to 1.2 GHz, enabling higher data speeds as well as additional high-definition television (HDTV) and video on demand (VOD) services.