Xceive XC5000/XC4000

This article discusses a family of silicon ICs, produced by Xceive, that combine RF tuner and analog IF demodulator functions within one chip. In addition, this page addresses the drivers that support these chips, as well as their firmware requirements.

IC Family Members

XC5000

The XC5000 has robust support for both analog and digital signals; it supports the analog TV broadcast standards (NTSC, PAL, & SECAM), CVBS, SIF and most digital TV standards (ATSC, DVB-C, DVB-T, DMB-T, & ISDB-T).

XC5000, intended for high-end TV applications that need noise performance exceeding that of can tuners. DSP blocks allow additional baseband programming functions for adding channel optimization features in the future.

Features a noise figure of 5dB. The XC5000 has an SNR greater than 53dB and a noise figure of -95dBc/Hz at 10kHz

XC4000

XC4000 family for midrange "value TV" markets, leaving out the QAM256 functions for handling ATSC/NTSC signals.

Features a noise figure of 5dB. The XC4000 has a 50dB SNR and noise figure of -85.

Source: http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800467625_499488_NP_660bf24d.HTM

XC5000 Drivers

There are two drivers versions:

• An in kernel driver - kernels 2.6.24+ will have built in support for the XC5000
• An out-of-tree 3rd party driver - from mrec.

Feature Support

• in-kernel xc5000 driver - analog/DVB-T/ATSC work fine; radio support is untested
• mrec's - ?

Firmware Information

The information in this section is directed only towards support for the in-kernel driver. For 3rd party driver requirements and/or information, please consult those sources directly.

How to Obtain the Firmware

1) Download the compressed Windows driver file & the XC5000 firmware extraction script "extract.sh". From the commandline you can simply run:

wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/extract.sh

2) Run the perl extraction script

sh extract.sh

From the output you will observe that the script first recovers the Windows driver file "hcw85bda.sys" from the zip archive, and then extracts the firmware contained within it into the current directory.

3) As per the instructions found at the end of the script's output, manually copy the generated firmware file to your firmware directory

cp dvb-fe-xc5000-1.1.fw /lib/firmware

Internal Links

• Xceive XC4000

External Links

• XC5000 product page
• XC4000 product page
• mrec's mcentral wiki - offers alternative, out of kernel, drivers for some xc5000 based devices