EN-Genius Selects Fusiv(R) Vx180 VDSL2 and Vx170 FTTH Gateway Processors as Best LAN Products
FREMONT, Calif., Feb. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ikanos Communications, Inc. , a leading developer and provider of Fiber Fast(TM) broadband solutions, announced today that its Fusiv(R) Vx180 VDSL2 and Vx170 FTTH gateway processors have been awarded "2007 Product of the Year -- Best LAN Product" by EN-Genius Network.
The Vx180 single chip multimode VDSL2 gateway processor and Vx170 FTTH gateway processor are designed to provide the features, performance, security and scalability required to deliver advanced triple play services over broadband pipes. Both solutions offer 2.7 GHz of processing power, integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and security features while supporting best-in-class Quality of Service (QoS) with wire-speed performance. Moreover, the Fusiv Vx180 also integrates Ikanos' industry-leading multimode VDSL2 technology to offer unsurpassed performance and physical layer integration for a triple play residential gateway.
"The Vx180 VDSL2 and Vx170 FTTH gateway processors help customer premises equipment (CPE) manufacturers address the double-edged challenge of providing multi-service capable products that help boost revenue, while keeping equipment costs under control," said Lee H. Goldberg, senior technical editor, EN-Genius Network.
The Vx180 and Vx170 residential gateway processors enable superior support of advanced triple play services through their unique and innovative distributed Accelerated Processor (AP) architecture. Differing from traditional multi-core and multi-thread approaches, Ikanos' powerful AP architecture offers a tremendous amount of processing performance in a small silicon area, while operating at very low power. These Accelerator Processors come equipped with local program and data memory to avoid resource conflicts and carry the entire bridging and routing effort, leaving 500 MHz of processing power available to support other advanced triple play services.
"We are very pleased that the editors at EN-Genius have awarded our high performance Vx180 VDSL2 and Vx170 FTTH gateway processors with their prestigious Product of the Year award," said Piyush Sevalia, Ikanos' vice president of marketing. "EN-Genius' endorsement validates Ikanos' leadership in providing innovative, high performance, integrated residential gateway platforms that enable service providers to launch triple play services more quickly and cost-effectively."
Instituted in 2003, EN-Genius Network's Product of the Year award recognizes data acquisition, audio/video technology, green tech, green-power engineering DSP, wireless connectivity, networking, passives, and low and high power products that best demonstrate strong technical merit, innovative design and exceptional marketability.
Source: cnnmoney.com
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
A closer look at 40 Mb/s DSL
What’s behind Rim Semiconductor’s recent claims of superfast DSL?
Rim Semiconductor turned some heads in January with a claim that its new chip can send traffic at 40 Mb/s over 5,500 feet of 26-gauge copper wire. The chip, which the company said will be commercially available later this year, promises big jumps in bandwidth for carriers such as AT&T that are trying to cram as much traffic as they can down existing copper lines.
But Rim’s approach is such a departure from currently dominant access technologies that it will have to work hard to establish new industry standards in order to get widespread deployment by major telcos.
Part of Rim’s technology involves changing how upstream and downstream bandwidth is allocated. The company is proposing an alternative to discrete multi-tone (DMT) line-coding, the encoding standard commonly employed in DSL networks including VDSL. Rather than reserve fixed allocations of upstream and downstream bandwidth, as DMT does, Rim’s chip uses time-division duplexing (instead of the frequency-division duplexing used in VDSL2) so that, when needed, downstream traffic can use bandwidth that would otherwise be reserved for upstream traffic, and vice versa. And it uses “rapid bi-directional switching” to transition in milliseconds from upstream and downstream transport.
“DMT’s fixed ratio of downstream and upstream [bandwidth] was absolutely appropriate at the time [it was created], but video has changed it all,” said Brad Ketch, Rim Semiconductor’s chief executive officer. “We feel and have felt that ultimately DMT would come to a point of diminishing returns.”
Redoing DMT is just part of Rim’s approach, said Ketch, a veteran of access vendor Advanced Fibre Communications (now Tellabs). Ketch is careful not to divulge too much about the company (which, despite not having a commercial product, has issued more than 30 press releases in the past two years). According to the firm’s Web site, Rim’s technology “defines” not just the encoding algorithms inside transport processors but also “the signal stream waveform.” Rim attacked rate and reach limitations in several ways, the company says, increasing payloads and decreasing noise and latency. Along the way, it made a few acquisitions to aid the effort, including that of 1020 Technologies and Broadband Distance Systems (a subsidiary of Utek).
The company has also hired Telcordia to, as Ketch put it, “study the impact of this technology in a binder group…to work over our shoulder make sure it makes sense to tier-one telcos.”
Ketch acknowledges that, in order to be useful, Rim’s technology would need to be deployed both in access networks and in customer premises gear, underscoring the need for standardizing the nascent technology.
“As far as the market goes, they’re sailing into the wind,” said Kermit Ross, a consultant with Millenium Marketing. “Given that the phone companies have a mix of [DSL] platforms in their networks as it is and a mix of different suppliers of DSL modems, there’s an awful lot of current flowing against making a thing like this work.”
To develop an industry standard for its technology, dubbed Internet Protocol Subscriber Line (IPSL), Rim has convened a group called the IPSL Special Interest Group, or IPSLSIG. Embarq is one of the few publicly named members of the group, which plans to meet a few times a year (its next meeting, slated for Europe, is being scheduled now, Ketch said).
“We invented IPSL, but we’re committed to making it available to other vendors because we’d like to see the ITU-T bring it in and standardize it,” Ketch said.
“Getting IPSL standardized will be one of the biggest hurdles for Rim Semi as it looks to bring its technology to market,” said Erik Keith, an analyst with Current Analysis.
Rim’s technology also requires IP DSLAMs rather than the legacy model based on ATM, though the majority of DSLAMs deployed today are IP-based..
Rim is currently testing a field-programmable version of its chip in the networks of small telcos such as Oregon’s Monroe Telephone. But with the help of partner eSilicon, Rim expects to introduce a less expensive ASIC version commercially this year.
Ketch imagines Rim’s gear making it possible for carriers to add more high-bandwidth service such as IPTV over existing copper, but he’s less certain about the technology’s potential to bring DSL to areas currently beyond reach. “That’s one application for the technology, but I think there are some question marks about the economics of it,” he said.
Meanwhile, vendors across the industry are working on separate efforts to increase the performance of DSL and copper. Established vendors are fine-tuning technologies such as Dynamic Spectrum Management and VDSL2 pair-bonding (Ketch says IPSL could potentially work in conjunction with both those technologies), while newcomers like Xtendwave and Phylogy promise their own new approaches.
“Since FTTP is prohibitively expensive for most telcos, getting more out of the existing copper access network is their most cost-effective option," Keith said.
Source: telephonyonline.com
Rim Semiconductor turned some heads in January with a claim that its new chip can send traffic at 40 Mb/s over 5,500 feet of 26-gauge copper wire. The chip, which the company said will be commercially available later this year, promises big jumps in bandwidth for carriers such as AT&T that are trying to cram as much traffic as they can down existing copper lines.
But Rim’s approach is such a departure from currently dominant access technologies that it will have to work hard to establish new industry standards in order to get widespread deployment by major telcos.
Part of Rim’s technology involves changing how upstream and downstream bandwidth is allocated. The company is proposing an alternative to discrete multi-tone (DMT) line-coding, the encoding standard commonly employed in DSL networks including VDSL. Rather than reserve fixed allocations of upstream and downstream bandwidth, as DMT does, Rim’s chip uses time-division duplexing (instead of the frequency-division duplexing used in VDSL2) so that, when needed, downstream traffic can use bandwidth that would otherwise be reserved for upstream traffic, and vice versa. And it uses “rapid bi-directional switching” to transition in milliseconds from upstream and downstream transport.
“DMT’s fixed ratio of downstream and upstream [bandwidth] was absolutely appropriate at the time [it was created], but video has changed it all,” said Brad Ketch, Rim Semiconductor’s chief executive officer. “We feel and have felt that ultimately DMT would come to a point of diminishing returns.”
Redoing DMT is just part of Rim’s approach, said Ketch, a veteran of access vendor Advanced Fibre Communications (now Tellabs). Ketch is careful not to divulge too much about the company (which, despite not having a commercial product, has issued more than 30 press releases in the past two years). According to the firm’s Web site, Rim’s technology “defines” not just the encoding algorithms inside transport processors but also “the signal stream waveform.” Rim attacked rate and reach limitations in several ways, the company says, increasing payloads and decreasing noise and latency. Along the way, it made a few acquisitions to aid the effort, including that of 1020 Technologies and Broadband Distance Systems (a subsidiary of Utek).
The company has also hired Telcordia to, as Ketch put it, “study the impact of this technology in a binder group…to work over our shoulder make sure it makes sense to tier-one telcos.”
Ketch acknowledges that, in order to be useful, Rim’s technology would need to be deployed both in access networks and in customer premises gear, underscoring the need for standardizing the nascent technology.
“As far as the market goes, they’re sailing into the wind,” said Kermit Ross, a consultant with Millenium Marketing. “Given that the phone companies have a mix of [DSL] platforms in their networks as it is and a mix of different suppliers of DSL modems, there’s an awful lot of current flowing against making a thing like this work.”
To develop an industry standard for its technology, dubbed Internet Protocol Subscriber Line (IPSL), Rim has convened a group called the IPSL Special Interest Group, or IPSLSIG. Embarq is one of the few publicly named members of the group, which plans to meet a few times a year (its next meeting, slated for Europe, is being scheduled now, Ketch said).
“We invented IPSL, but we’re committed to making it available to other vendors because we’d like to see the ITU-T bring it in and standardize it,” Ketch said.
“Getting IPSL standardized will be one of the biggest hurdles for Rim Semi as it looks to bring its technology to market,” said Erik Keith, an analyst with Current Analysis.
Rim’s technology also requires IP DSLAMs rather than the legacy model based on ATM, though the majority of DSLAMs deployed today are IP-based..
Rim is currently testing a field-programmable version of its chip in the networks of small telcos such as Oregon’s Monroe Telephone. But with the help of partner eSilicon, Rim expects to introduce a less expensive ASIC version commercially this year.
Ketch imagines Rim’s gear making it possible for carriers to add more high-bandwidth service such as IPTV over existing copper, but he’s less certain about the technology’s potential to bring DSL to areas currently beyond reach. “That’s one application for the technology, but I think there are some question marks about the economics of it,” he said.
Meanwhile, vendors across the industry are working on separate efforts to increase the performance of DSL and copper. Established vendors are fine-tuning technologies such as Dynamic Spectrum Management and VDSL2 pair-bonding (Ketch says IPSL could potentially work in conjunction with both those technologies), while newcomers like Xtendwave and Phylogy promise their own new approaches.
“Since FTTP is prohibitively expensive for most telcos, getting more out of the existing copper access network is their most cost-effective option," Keith said.
Source: telephonyonline.com
Monday, January 28, 2008
GPON chips rush home
Startup Iamba Networks Inc. today will roll out its first chips to bring fiber to the home, joining a growing chorus of companies hoping a long-awaited ramp in gigabit passive optical networks (GPONs) will begin this year.
Competitors including BroadLight, Conexant, Freescale and PMC-Sierra are angling for position with a coming generation of more-integrated chips. The silicon promises to merge into one box optical terminals outside the home and residential gateways inside it.
But it is still unclear exactly how and when the major carriers, each with its own unique requirements, will be ready to switch on GPONs as the next step in broadband service. "The market just isn't
there yet, because it's still developing," said Jag Bolaria, senior analyst with the Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.). "Verizon is leading the way with BPON [broadband passive optical networks], but they are just in field trials with GPON so far."
Complicating the picture, the systems are typically designed by large telecom companies--including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Hua Wei, Motorola, Nokia Siemens Networks and Tellabs--but made by a broader group of smaller companies, many of them scattered across Taiwan and China.
As it joins the fray, startup Iamba (Cupertino, Calif.) is claiming to offer higher performance, lower costs and deeper software support than some of the competition. Its iSN-1000 chips use as many as three Altera Nios cores delivering up to 540 Dhrystone Mips to run software the company provides for IPTV, voice-over-Internet Protocol and GPON management, as well as applications developed by systems makers and carriers.
Iamba is sampling a three-member family of 1.2-watt chips, ranging from a gigabit chip for a single home to a high-end part supporting up to 24 virtual connections for an apartment building. It expects to have parts in production in 60 days.
The chips are designed for four-layer boards and sell for $15 apiece in volumes of more than 100,000 units. They target optical network terminals that cost less than $100 for outdoor units. Iamba aims to follow up the launch with chips sampling in April for the optical line unit, which drives back-end carrier systems.
Iamba's technology "is an improvement over chip sets from companies like BroadLight, Freescale and others," said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband and IPTV at Infonetics Research (Wake Forest, N.C.). "The big question is whether Iamba's technology provides a significant [enough] cost savings to the equipment makers that it makes sense to include its reference designs to potentially increase margins. Now that volume GPON deployments are beginning, price and field experience are going to be the major factors."
The company got its start in 2000 with plans to deliver systems for 622-Mbit/second ATM-based BPON technology, but after a management change in 2005 it shifted to semiconductors and 2.5-Gbit/s GPONs.
"The BPON market was slowing, and it would have cost tens of millions of dollars to launch a new systems company that would have to compete with the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Hua Wei and others," said Reuven Segev, vice president of marketing at Iamba.
Eyes on the horizon
Chip makers are optimistic this is the year GPON boxes will roll into neighborhoods where carriers are deploying fiber-to-the-home services like Verizon's FiOS.
"We've been in a systems design phase for the last six months" as OEMs port their voice and management software to chips, said Pranay Aiya, a director of marketing of Conexant Systems Inc.. "Deployments have taken longer than expected, and Verizon's transition to GPON has been slower than expected." Still, the company is hopeful volumes will expand beyond 10 million units a year by 2011, Aiya said.
"We expect the industry to ramp this year, because a lot of carriers have had this technology in lab and field trials," said Dan Parsons, vice president of marketing at BroadLight. The company has sold about 250,000 chips for GPON terminals to date and has orders on hand for another 350,000. Some of the early deployments serviced small systems in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In the United States, AT&T has said it may use GPON for new homes starting this year. But for most customers, AT&T uses a fiber-to-the curb architecture, with VDSL2 over copper to the home.
"It looks like we will see a ramp starting in the second half," said Steven Haas, a director of product marketing at PMC-Sierra Inc., which has sold only sample quantities of GPON chips to date. "Everybody is talking about Verizon and AT&T and a few other possibilities in Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore."
China Netcom and China Telecom have said they will deploy Gigabit Ethernet PON technology in new apartment buildings, said BroadLight's Parsons. In Europe, France Telecom has said it aims to connect as many as 200,000 subscribers in 2008 with integrated GPON gateways.
A key milestone for GPON has been getting everyone's equipment tested. The Full Service Access Network group of carriers and system vendors has been conducting interoperability events hosted by carriers, which optimize tests for some of the particular characteristics of their networks.
"By the second half, I think there will be good interoperability for each of the carrier networks, and the risks of buying the two ends from different vendors will be diminished," said PMC-Sierra's Haas.
Some chip makers, such as BroadLight and Iamba, aim at sales into systems on both ends of the wire. Others are targeting volume sales to home terminals only.
Freescale Semiconductor, for one, has no plans for chips serving the back-end carrier systems. "Most of the systems vendors are using custom FPGAs for that," said Suhail Agwani, a marketing and business development manager in Freescale's Networking and Multimedia group.
One unknown for those aiming at gateway boxes is which home-networking technologies will take off. Verizon is backing Multimedia over Coax, AT&T is using phone-line networking and many carriers in Europe will adopt HomePlug power line technology. Chip makers include a PCI link to an external home-net chip that carriers can specify for their gateways.
The need to tailor terminals for each carrier's requirements is one reason systems makers like Alcatel tend to contract with a range of small design houses.
Source: eetimes.com
Competitors including BroadLight, Conexant, Freescale and PMC-Sierra are angling for position with a coming generation of more-integrated chips. The silicon promises to merge into one box optical terminals outside the home and residential gateways inside it.
But it is still unclear exactly how and when the major carriers, each with its own unique requirements, will be ready to switch on GPONs as the next step in broadband service. "The market just isn't
there yet, because it's still developing," said Jag Bolaria, senior analyst with the Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.). "Verizon is leading the way with BPON [broadband passive optical networks], but they are just in field trials with GPON so far."
Complicating the picture, the systems are typically designed by large telecom companies--including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Hua Wei, Motorola, Nokia Siemens Networks and Tellabs--but made by a broader group of smaller companies, many of them scattered across Taiwan and China.
As it joins the fray, startup Iamba (Cupertino, Calif.) is claiming to offer higher performance, lower costs and deeper software support than some of the competition. Its iSN-1000 chips use as many as three Altera Nios cores delivering up to 540 Dhrystone Mips to run software the company provides for IPTV, voice-over-Internet Protocol and GPON management, as well as applications developed by systems makers and carriers.
Iamba is sampling a three-member family of 1.2-watt chips, ranging from a gigabit chip for a single home to a high-end part supporting up to 24 virtual connections for an apartment building. It expects to have parts in production in 60 days.
The chips are designed for four-layer boards and sell for $15 apiece in volumes of more than 100,000 units. They target optical network terminals that cost less than $100 for outdoor units. Iamba aims to follow up the launch with chips sampling in April for the optical line unit, which drives back-end carrier systems.
Iamba's technology "is an improvement over chip sets from companies like BroadLight, Freescale and others," said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband and IPTV at Infonetics Research (Wake Forest, N.C.). "The big question is whether Iamba's technology provides a significant [enough] cost savings to the equipment makers that it makes sense to include its reference designs to potentially increase margins. Now that volume GPON deployments are beginning, price and field experience are going to be the major factors."
The company got its start in 2000 with plans to deliver systems for 622-Mbit/second ATM-based BPON technology, but after a management change in 2005 it shifted to semiconductors and 2.5-Gbit/s GPONs.
"The BPON market was slowing, and it would have cost tens of millions of dollars to launch a new systems company that would have to compete with the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Hua Wei and others," said Reuven Segev, vice president of marketing at Iamba.
Eyes on the horizon
Chip makers are optimistic this is the year GPON boxes will roll into neighborhoods where carriers are deploying fiber-to-the-home services like Verizon's FiOS.
"We've been in a systems design phase for the last six months" as OEMs port their voice and management software to chips, said Pranay Aiya, a director of marketing of Conexant Systems Inc.. "Deployments have taken longer than expected, and Verizon's transition to GPON has been slower than expected." Still, the company is hopeful volumes will expand beyond 10 million units a year by 2011, Aiya said.
"We expect the industry to ramp this year, because a lot of carriers have had this technology in lab and field trials," said Dan Parsons, vice president of marketing at BroadLight. The company has sold about 250,000 chips for GPON terminals to date and has orders on hand for another 350,000. Some of the early deployments serviced small systems in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In the United States, AT&T has said it may use GPON for new homes starting this year. But for most customers, AT&T uses a fiber-to-the curb architecture, with VDSL2 over copper to the home.
"It looks like we will see a ramp starting in the second half," said Steven Haas, a director of product marketing at PMC-Sierra Inc., which has sold only sample quantities of GPON chips to date. "Everybody is talking about Verizon and AT&T and a few other possibilities in Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore."
China Netcom and China Telecom have said they will deploy Gigabit Ethernet PON technology in new apartment buildings, said BroadLight's Parsons. In Europe, France Telecom has said it aims to connect as many as 200,000 subscribers in 2008 with integrated GPON gateways.
A key milestone for GPON has been getting everyone's equipment tested. The Full Service Access Network group of carriers and system vendors has been conducting interoperability events hosted by carriers, which optimize tests for some of the particular characteristics of their networks.
"By the second half, I think there will be good interoperability for each of the carrier networks, and the risks of buying the two ends from different vendors will be diminished," said PMC-Sierra's Haas.
Some chip makers, such as BroadLight and Iamba, aim at sales into systems on both ends of the wire. Others are targeting volume sales to home terminals only.
Freescale Semiconductor, for one, has no plans for chips serving the back-end carrier systems. "Most of the systems vendors are using custom FPGAs for that," said Suhail Agwani, a marketing and business development manager in Freescale's Networking and Multimedia group.
One unknown for those aiming at gateway boxes is which home-networking technologies will take off. Verizon is backing Multimedia over Coax, AT&T is using phone-line networking and many carriers in Europe will adopt HomePlug power line technology. Chip makers include a PCI link to an external home-net chip that carriers can specify for their gateways.
The need to tailor terminals for each carrier's requirements is one reason systems makers like Alcatel tend to contract with a range of small design houses.
Source: eetimes.com
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