By Light Reading
Publication Date: 2026-05-19 14:53:00
Though the market for DOCSIS tech will no doubt get smaller in the years to come, the good news is that operators and modem makers still have a choice of chips as operators and suppliers enter the DOCSIS 4.0 era.
MaxLinear is pushing into that sector with the Puma 8, a modem chipset that supports the Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) version of D4.0 that keeps upstream and downstream traffic running in dedicated spectrum. MaxLinear also has a version of the Puma 8 for DOCSIS 3.1+ that enables operators to beef up downstream speeds by opening up additional Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) channels.
Broadcom remains the other key DOCSIS silicon player with new, AI-infused “unified” DOCSIS 4.0 chips for modems, amplifiers and nodes that can support both ESD and Full Duplex (FDX), an option favored by Comcast that features an FDX band that enables upstream and downstream traffic to run in the same block of spectrum. Broadcom also has built a separate D3.1+ chip called the…
