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National Semiconductor CLC5665 Op. Amp.

The manufacturer says . . .

Chipcenter's Paul McGoldrick says . . .

National Semiconductor Corporation announced the CLC5665, a new low-cost 90MHz operational amplifier that is ideally suited for video distribution, twisted-pair cable driver (xDSL), and digital video applications. The device is priced approximately 40 percent less than other products in its class, establishing a new price/performance point in the market.

Other potential applications for the CLC5665 include 8-10 bit video ADC drivers and DAC buffers for digital video, and cable drivers for video, set-top boxes and modems. To meet the design needs of these applications, the CLC5665 offers fast disable, wide bandwidth, high speed and low distortion. The disable feature saves power by dropping the supply current from 11 milliamps to 1.5 milliamps when the amplifier is not being used.

"The CLC5665 is a breakthrough in price/performance for high-volume communication and video applications that require superior dynamic line driving performance," said Jeff Hooker, marketing manager for National's high-speed amplifier products. "This device offers our customers the highest performance available at a price that's about half that of alternative solutions."

Features and Benefits
National's CLC5665 provides low harmonic distortion (-89dBc at 1MHz, 1Vpp out with a 500 Ohm load) to enable high signal fidelity. For design flexibility, the CLC5665 can run off either +/-5V or +/-15V supplies. By running off +/-15V supplies and driving to within 1V of the rails, the device enables much better output dynamic voltage range -- up to an impressive 28V -- than cable drivers limited to +/-5V supplies.

The device also offers a wide array of key features:

High 1800 volts/microsecond slew rate.

High output current of 85 milliamps.<

Fast disable and enable times of 200 nanoseconds and 400 nanoseconds, respectively.

Very low differential gain of 0.05 percent and differential phase of 0.05 degrees.

Flat (0.1dB) gain to 20MHz, making it a preferred device for broadcast-quality NTSC and PAL video systems.

The xDSL equipment market is in a major over-supply situation with the installation of most systems lagging behind because of regulatory problems, local challenges and competition requests, and the sheer limit to what the companies can install in the time available. That being so -- and this being another area that the Asian vendors have indicated they are going to pursue -- the usual market drivers for success come into play: lower price, higher performance. This National part (from the Comlinear stable) has the bandwidth, an extremely good output drive level and a reasonably high slew rate at 1800 V/�s (but not the highest out there) at a very reasonable price. The other markets that the company envisions may be stronger in some ways: the composite video driver market (for professional equipment) is not consumer sized but large and profitable, and the low differential phase and gain set it to be good in that domain. I also like the powerdown consumption.

What National sees to be a digital video market is not in my sight; the DTV market for serial video needs product out to 1.2 GHz and I presume the company is thinking of the digital signal as being an MPEG-2 data train, probably out to about 20 Mbit/s. That is certainly a valid marketplace but I doubt there is any application where the output drive level achievable here is required.

The CLC5665 will have some major design wins, mostly I believe because of the performance achieved at the price. It is in production now and is available in either an 8-pin plastic DIP or SOIC-8 and is priced at $1.14 in 1000-piece lots.

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