Editor: Linley
Gwennap In
This Issue
Save the date! Mark your calendars for March 19 for a Linley Tech seminar on CPU Cores and IP for Networking. Leading IP vendors will explain how their technology can be used in networking and communications applications. This one-day event will focus on CPU cores and other licensable intellectual property (IP) and is intended for designers of ASICs and SoCs (systems on a chip). Details will be announced soon. Last chance to register. Complimentary registration closes this Friday, January 25. Don’t miss your chance to learn about the latest trends and chips for Carrier Ethernet on Wednesday, January 30, at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose. Sponsored by: Freescale, AMCC, EZchip, Wintegra, Netronome, Xelerated, Lightstorm, TPACK, and the Ethernet Alliance. Last week, Ikanos purchased Centillium’s DSL business for $12 million. With this deal, Ikanos gets incremental revenue, new products, 60 patents, and some engineering resources. Ikanos can now add central-office ADSL products to its existing CPE products. The company did not disclose the amount of incremental revenue or the number of Centillium engineers that will be offered position at Ikanos. We expect Ikanos to extend offers primarily to the mixed-signal designers at Centillium. In 3Q07, Centillium reported its ADSL revenue was $6 million, about half of what it was a year earlier. Most of this revenue comes from Sumitomo and NEC in Japan, which has been steadily migrating from DSL to fiber. Given these declines, Ikanos should see incremental revenue of around $14 million for 2008, boosting its total revenue by more than 10%. By merging these products with its existing ADSL and VDSL lines, Ikanos can reduce operating costs and enable better product margins than at Centillium. Ikanos’s new management has made a smart move to continue revenue growth by acquiring a business for less than the current revenue. Additionally, Ikanos could win VDSL2 designs at the former Centillium customers. Centillium’s ADSL revenue has been declining since 2005, and the company has yet to have a profitable quarter. With this divestiture, Centillium gets rid of the losses it was generating from its DSL business - estimated at $18 million per year. Engineering issues caused Centillium to be late with VDSL2 products; the company could not win any major designs and lacked the resources to maintain a competitive roadmap. Centillium made the smart move to dump its DSL business and focus on PON, where the company has new customers, a growing revenue stream, and less formidable competitors. —Jag Complete coverage of Ikanos and Centillium appears in our new report A Guide to Broadband Chips. This week, Mindspeed announced the newest member in its family of voice processors, the Comcerto 300. Despite its lower number, the new processor is an upgrade to the medium-density Comcerto 500. Improvements include the use of ARM11 CPUs instead of ARM9s, an updated memory controller supporting DDR DRAM, a shift from Fast Ethernet and Utopia/POS ports to Gigabit Ethernet with integrated serdes, and a wider ball pitch to reduce system manufacturing costs. The basic architecture remains the same: a control plane CPU, a CPU for data-plane processing, and a voice DSP connected by an internal bus and sharing internal memory resources. Mindspeed uses the same architecture, without the DSP, in its Comcerto 100 gateway processor. The most significant change is one of positioning. The Comcerto 500 had been positioned mainly for PBX applications, with the high-density members of the Comcerto line addressing carrier gateways. While we expect existing customers of the 500 to migrate to the 300 for new designs, Mindspeed is also promoting the 300 for carrier applications. Wireline carriers, best exemplified by British Telecom and its “21st Century” (21CN) initiative, are moving toward VoIP within their network even while maintaining POTS service to end customers. Operational savings come from maintaining a single packet-based network and eliminating Class 4 and Class 5 switches. Instead of using dedicated media gateways, these operators push the analog-to-packet conversion to the periphery of the access network. Correspondingly, equipment companies are building systems that provide both voice and DSL access. With the trend toward Ethernet in the backplane, it makes sense to perform the analog-to-packet conversion on the same line card as DSL termination. The Comcerto 300 is well suited for such an application. The integrated serdes simplify connection to an Ethernet backplane, and the medium (<100-channel) throughput matches up well with the port density of DSL line cards and pizza-box systems. Mindspeed is an established supplier and thus provides a mature set of software, including a full set of voice codecs. With high-density voice proving to be a slow-growth market and Mindspeed having established itself in the enterprise-voice market, it makes sense for Mindspeed to adapt its positioning of the Comcerto 300. Moreover, the change simplifies product development, because the same basic architecture can serve CPE (via the Comcerto 100), enterprise, and now carrier applications. —Joe Complete coverage of the Comcerto 100 appears in our recent report A Guide to Communications Processors. This week, Dune Networks announced two new FAP (fabric access processor) devices for its Sand fabric, which also includes the FE200 switch chip. The new devices offer SPI-4.2 interfaces for the line side and comply with the TR-59 specification for traffic management. The FAP21V is a 20Gbps device that has two SPI-4.2 interfaces, while the FAP11V is a 10Gbps that has a single SPI-4.2 interface. Each device may be used with the FE200 to create a star fabric or can be used without the FE200 for a mesh fabric. In a mesh configuration, the FAP21V devices support up to 60Gbps system bandwidth. Each FAP may also be used as a standalone traffic manager working alongside a third-party fabric, performing flow-based shaping and rate limiting between the ingress and egress ports. Offering system bandwidth ranging to multiple terabits per second, Dune continues to be the leading independent vendor of switch fabric and traffic management devices for highly scalable networks. —Jag Complete coverage of Dune appears in our report A Guide to Backplane Switch Chips. Now, in just a single
report you can get comprehensive coverage of network processors
spanning data rates from 2Gbps to 100Gbps. "A
Guide to Network Processors" combines the coverage previously
found in our "Guide to Access Processors" and our "Guide
to Metro Network Processors."
Here are some of the many new features of this report:
Order by Jan 31 to get a special prepublication discount. For more information on this new edition, visit our web site. To receive Linley Wire via e-mail, click here
|
