PMC Combines Voice, Data in MAN

Electronic News, May 7, 2001 by Tom Murphy

AS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS BECOME DRIVEN MORE AND MORE by data services, telecommunication carriers are searching for ways to merge their voice traffic with Internet traffic. PMC-Sierra Inc.'s latest release is the final piece in its overall strategy to allow carriers to groom and aggregate both voice and data traffic in metro area networks (MANs) for long-haul transmission.

PMC-Sierra of Burnaby, British Columbia, is unleashing a family of clock recovery and framer devices, known as XENON, that the company is positioning for 0C-192 asynchronous transfer mode (ATM)/packet-over-synchronous optical networking (SONET), and 10Gbit Ethernet services in the MAN.

The company has released four previous chips that all complement its 10Gbit Ethernet strategy. All of the chips are designed to industry-standard specifications from the ITU IEEE, OIF and ATM forum and the four devices in the XENON family are designated for upcoming generations of MAN edge and core equipment such as routers, data center and point-of-presence switches and multiservice provisioning platforms.

The XENON family of chips is designed to work in conjunction with PMC-Sierra's channelized cross-connect chipset, the multigigabit serializer/deserializer interconnect chips, and its l0Gbit/sec. alliance with MultiLink Technology Corp.

The XENON family consists of the PM5390S/UNI-9953, which consists of six separate l0Gbit framing/processing modes; the PM5392S/UNI-9953-POS, which is a POS-PHY Level 4 framer for SONET/synchronous digital hierarchy applications; the PM3392 S/UNI-1x10GE single-channel l0GE LAN PHY device; and a PM3388 S/UNI-10xGE 10-port gigabit Ethernet device.