Editor: Linley
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PON Market Heats Up This week, PMC-Sierra expanded its xPON product line with the announcement of EPON products for China and demonstration of its GPON ONT controller. China Telecom has decided to move forward with EPON instead of GPON but has added requirements for encryption, classification, prioritization, and QoS procedures. PMC now offers the PAS6301 for the ONU and the PAS5201 for the OLT. These devices support China-specific features as well as end-to-end forward error correction and large packet buffers for IPTV. PMC also offers a reference design for an ONU with VoIP support. PMC is the first company to offer both EPON and GPON controllers. For its GPON products, the company was able to reuse the Gigapass architecture originally developed for its EPON products. At the ITU Telecom World 2006 conference in Hong Kong this month, PMC plans to demonstrate interoperability of its GPON ONT against an OLT from ZTE. After announcing its GPON products in 2005, PMC is now in a position to demonstrate them. Other vendors offer either GPON silicon or EPON silicon for China Telecom (CT). For GPON, PMC lags market leader BroadLight, and for EPON it competes against Teknovus. Last month, Teknovus announced its own CT-ready EPON products. This week, Teknovus announced deployment of its Turbo EPON devices, which implement a proprietary 2.5Gbps version of EPON. The company announced KDDI as the first carrier to deploy Turbo EPON. Immenstar also plans to offer EPON silicon that meets CT requirements. With CT's desire to select at least two silicon suppliers, PMC and Teknovus are in good position to win additional business that will ramp in 2008. —Jag Complete coverage of PON products from PMC-Sierra, Teknovus, and Immenstar appears in our new report A Guide to Broadband Interface Chips. This week, IDT announced a family of PCI Express (PCIe) switches, each optimized for a different application, such as PCIe fan out, PCIe adapters, blade servers, and storage systems. Branded Precise, the family includes eight switches that offer 3 to 12 ports and 8 to 48 lanes, which can be divided among the ports. IDT plans to sample the 12-port device in 1Q07 and is currently sampling all the other switches. To differentiate its Precise product family, IDT has added support for a large number of flow-control credits and support for large-size payloads. Both of these features can improve performance. Adapters that typically have 5 flow-control credits can create a bottleneck in the root complex. By increasing the flow-control credits to 32, the Precise switches buffer the data between the root complex and the end point and thus eliminate a potential bottleneck. Compared with competing PCIe switches, IDT has increased the maximum payload size from 256 bytes to 4K bytes. This is a useful feature for storage applications that move large blocks of data. Not all system chip sets, however, support the larger payload. Although it is reaching the market later than competitor PLX Technology, IDT is offering a broader range of PCIe switches encompassing more ports and lanes than PLX offers. IDT's devices also dissipate lower power per port. Although most competing products use the same process technology and power supplies, IDT reduced power by minimizing features such as the number of virtual channels. Completing its product line and adding unique features should help IDT win designs in 2007. The Precise family of PCIe switches provides OEMs with an alternate supplier and should further legitimize this market, which we expect to grow rapidly in 2007 and 2008. —Jag Coverage of PCI Express switches appears in our report A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects. The announcement that LSI Logic will acquire Agere caught industry watchers by surprise. The two companies have extensive but nearly nonoverlapping product portfolios. Both have sizable ASIC businesses but are transitioning to standard products. LSI sold its communications business earlier this year, but now it has spent $4 billion to buy a communications-chip vendor. Dear Abhi—what were you thinking? Upon further examination, some opportunities for synergy emerge. The obvious one is that both companies sell chips to the storage market, although LSI focuses on storage connectivity while Agere sells hard-drive controllers. Companies such as Seagate are common customers. Another potential synergy is with Agere's Gigabit Ethernet products, which could be used in IP storage networks. Like many of LSI's storage solutions, these Ethernet products target enterprise customers. Agere's communications business is much stronger than LSI's former communications business, which consisted mainly of a low-cost DSP product line. Agere offers many products for access infrastructure, including ATM chips and network processors. Although this business has little synergy with LSI's other product lines, we believe it is profitable and could counterbalance fluctuations in LSI's consumer revenue. On the other hand, LSI could decide to spin off or sell this business to make the acquisition more digestible. Agere's handset-processor business is sizable, but the company trails six others in market share, and we believe this business is not profitable. A key shortcoming of Agere's handset chips, however, is their lack of 3D graphics and video support, technologies that LSI happens to support in its Zevio applications processor. LSI could try to fix Agere's handset business, but that would be an expensive and time-consuming project. —Linley Complete coverage of Agere's network processors appears in our recent report A Guide to Access Processors. Last week, Broadcom announced the acquisition of software vendor LVL7 Systems. The cash deal is valued at about $62 million. Privately held LVL7 provides complete software for Ethernet-switch designs based on merchant silicon from Broadcom, Marvell, SwitchCore, and Vitesse. The seven-year-old LVL7 disclosed its last round of funding in early 2005, and we believe the company had reached profitability. But most of LVL7's design wins were based on Broadcom silicon, and Marvell had competing software capabilities in house thanks to its 2003 acquisition of Radlan. Given the limited growth opportunities for the small vendor, joining forces with its largest silicon partner makes good sense for both parties. —Bob Complete coverage of Broadcom's Ethernet switch chips appears in our report A Guide to Gigabit and 10G Ethernet Chips. Last month, Pericom expanded its PCI Express portfolio with the announcement of a PCIe to PCI-X bridge. The PI7C9X130 bridges between x4 PCIe lanes and a single PCI-X domain. The fully reversible bridge offers transparent and non-transparent modes for PCI and PCI-X. Capable of supporting 512 byte payloads, the PI7C9X130 should support transfers between most PC systems and adapters. By adding this bridge to its PCIe switch product line, Pericom can offer OEMs a single source for PCI bridging and switching components as well as compete effectively against PLX Technology. —Jag Coverage of PCI Express switches appears in our report A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects. This week, AMCC announced its next-generation Sonet/SDH framer/pointer processor devices, known as Drava and Mura. Compared to earlier devices from AMCC, these chips integrate serdes and add an enhanced 384x384 STS-1 crossconnect. The two devices target line cards of up to 5Gbps in MSPP and ADM systems, including reconfigurable optical ADMs (ROADM). For the client interfaces, Drava supports 16xOC-3, 8xOC-12, or 1xOC-48, along with ring protection. Drava aggregates the client interfaces onto the TFI-5 interface, which passes the data over a backplane to the switch fabric. A subset of Drava, Mura provides OC-3 and OC-12 support, but not OC-48. OEMs can combine Drava with AMCC's Volta mapper to develop a mixed data/TDM line card for ROADMs. Although these enhancements are unlikely to justify cost reduction redesigns for existing MSPPs, they should be attractive for new mixed data/TDM applications. —Jag In this new edition, we bring you up to date on the VDSL2 and PON silicon markets, applications, and vendors as we look at silicon for both ends of the wire: CO and CPE applications. Here are some of the many highlights you will find in this new edition:
A Guide to Broadband Interface Chips provides the comprehensive analysis you need to make informed business decisions. Get up to speed quickly on this rapidly changing market. For more information on this new edition, visit our web site.
Now in its eighth edition, A Guide to Metro Network Processors focuses on the mid-range (OC-48) and high-end (10 - 40Gbps) NPUs typically used in metro applications. The report also covers configurable packet processors that compete with NPUs for Metro Ethernet designs. With NPUs becoming a critical ingredient in metro equipment, these chips are appearing in new designs from leading OEMs spanning many applications from Metro Ethernet switches to core routers. This broad adoption has created a market large enough to sustain multiple vendors, yet some large vendors have abandoned the market, leaving excellent opportunities for more-focused vendors. Only The Linley Group follows this market closely enough to give you the complete picture. Which major vendors are in this business for the long haul? Which startups will survive and which will fail? How do the latest products stack up? "A Guide to Metro Network Processors" is the result of years of research that cannot be duplicated. If you are interested in following this emerging strategic standard-product segment, you have located the definitive source. Order by December 28 to get a special prepublication discount. For more information on this new edition, visit our web site. To receive The Linley Wire via e-mail, click here
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