Every cable modem, set-top box and digital TV needs a tuner, the part that picks one channel out of the crowded airwaves. For decades that meant a metal can full of hand-tuned parts. Microtune, a Texas startup, set out to put the whole thing on silicon. By its August 2000 offering, it sold radio frequency tuners and transceivers to makers of broadband gear, betting that every new device would need one.

Two Founders in Plano

Douglas Bartek and John Norsworthy founded Microtune in Texas in May 1996 and started work that August. Norsworthy served as chief technology officer. Their idea was a radio frequency integrated circuit that did the job of a traditional can tuner, smaller, cheaper and easier to build into a product. The timing looked ideal. Cable modems and digital set-top boxes were spreading fast, and each one needed at least one tuner to receive video, data or voice.

Tuned Out in 2010

Microtune priced its offering at $16 a share in August 2000 and listed on Nasdaq under TUNE. The telecom and tech slump hit soon after, and demand for broadband gear fell. Microtune kept selling tuner chips into TVs, cable boxes and car radios for the rest of the decade, as tuners moved onto silicon across the industry it had targeted. In 2010 Zoran, a California maker of digital TV and imaging chips, bought the company.

Cover: The Double Bass Player, Alphonse Legros. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a musician tuning in (the tuner).