Silicon Tuners vs. CAN Tuners

Here you can see the MC44C801 as implemented on a reference card and a CAN tuner. The silicon tuner, which is a dual conversion tuner, has many benefits over a CAN tuner. No tracking filters are required, so no manual tuning needs to be done. Silicon tuners have improved temperature response as well as improved aging performance.

Operating the device within temperature and over time, has no impact on a silicon tuner compared to a CAN tuner, which will suffer from both of these conditions.

The silicon tuner can be integrated on the customer's main board, whereas you can see from the lower right-hand picture of the implementation of the CAN tuner, it's implemented as sort of a daughtercard, perpendicular to the PCB plane itself. Implementing a silicon tuner IC instead of a CAN tuner will ultimately lower the cost of implementation, not only from the components perspective but from the reduced manufacturing manpower.