CATV distribution systems for the decade of the 90s will have new requirements placed on them to satisfy market demands for new services and higher reliability. These requirements will affect the architectures and layouts of distribution systems, and the type and performance of the RF amplifiers used in the RF portion of the distribution system.
Fiber's great bandwidth combined with shorter RF cascades opens up the possibility of using more bandwidth to provide more services to the consumer or different services to new consumers. This paper examines amplifier technologies that can be used to satisfy the requirements of new distribution systems. It also looks at migration paths for current systems so that they can satisfy future bandwidth requirements.
The performance of current amplifiers and the implications of their performance on the performance of extended bandwidth amplifiers is examined. Performance improvement opportunities within the RF amplifier will be identified. The resulting optimized amplifier performance will be analyzed.