2001 Ad

Electronic News, June 4, 2001 by Steven Fyffe

The painful lessons of this downturn have left communications chipmakers with plenty of questions to ponder over a stiff drink or two at this week's Supercomm 2001 show in Atlanta. Talk of market carnage dominated the pre-conference buzz.

"That conversation will be over scotch," said Raymond Milano, vice president of analog products at Vitesse Semiconductor Corp., Camarillo, Calif. "That topic calls for serious drinking."

Everybody wants to know if and when the big equipment makers will dump their old inventory and start placing fresh orders again. "When will all of this excess inventory bleed off?" asked Aidan O'Rourke, marketing director for DSL products at Irvine, Calif.-based Broadcom Corp. "How long will it be before real volumes start ramping again? When will the aftermarket recover, especially after dot-coms have dropped so much equipment on the market at fire-sale prices? When will we see the turnaround?"

The downturn may have dampened spirits, but it has not affected the demand for bandwidth, according to Ben Runyan, product manager at Infineon Technologies AG. "We are obviously going through the economic doldrums right now, but the demand for bandwidth has not slowed down at all," Runyan said.

In fact, some believe the downturn has actually spurred chipmakers to invest in the future and may even have sped up the ongoing progress toward 4OGbit/sec. and beyond.

"This downturn gives people a breather to work on their next-generation component and system development," Vitesse's (nasdaq: VTSS) Milano said. "Just because orders are likely to be depressed for a period of time, it doesn't mean people have stopped trying to push the limits of system performance," he added. "Everybody is trying to figure out what happens beyond 10Gbit/sec. There will be various approaches to achieve 40Gbit/sec."

Infineon (nyse: IFX) has its own opinion about how to get to 40Gbit/sec. and a new product to back it up. The Munich, Germany-based company plans to make a Supercomm debut with its OC-768 (40 Gbit/sec.) multiplexer/demultiplexer chipset for next-generation synchronous optical networking/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) communication systems. The chipset can be used to build-out high-speed metropolitan area networks (MANs). The F0A4400 multiplexer chip, the FOA5400 demultiplexer chip and evaluation boards are available now.

One of the hottest topics in the ADSL space will be France-based Alcatel's on-again, off-again proposed buyout of Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, N.J.; a megadeal that could crush competition in the ASDSL space.

"If you are looking at a combined Alcatel and Lucent ... you have got an entity that has 75 percent if not more of all the ADSL ports in the business," Broadcom's O'Rourke said. "There are lots of ramifications in terms of who can actually compete in the market."

Some chipmakers are concerned about the ongoing prospects of the DSL market as a whole. "What is the future of DSL, especially given the shakeout at the service provider and OEM 1evels and the depression of the (telecommunications) sector?" said a spokeswoman for Analog Devices Inc. (ADI).

Others are bullish on the prospects of the symmetrical high-bit-rate digital subscriber line (SHDSL) space. Outsiders will get a once-a-year chance to glimpse most of the industry's players demonstrating the interoperability of their SHDSL chipsets at the DSL Forum booth, Runyan said.

Broadcom's O'Rourke said that extending Ethernet into the access network would also be a hot topic. "We are seeing a huge amount of new start-ups and a lot of established players who are starting to get into the business of delivering Ethernet services."

Supercomm Announcements

Allentown, Pa.-based Agere Systems introduces the PI-40 multiterabit OC-768c-capable switch fabric for high-performance networks and a l0Gbit/sec. version of its PayloadPlus network processor, providing wire-speed, carrier-class, programmable deep-packet-processing capability for high-performance packet-processing systems.

San Diego-based Applied Micro Circuits Corp. announces the availability of the Mekong (S19204), an OC-192 SONET/SDH framing and pointer processor device targeted at optical networking equipment; the Zambezi (S8710), an STS-1 cross-connect grooming fabric designed for line card use; and the Verrazano (S2509), a 10Gbit/sec. Digital Wrapper serializer/deserializer supporting SONET/SDH transport and very short reach OC-192 and OC-48 transponder applications utilizing four 2.488Gbit/sec. to 2.67Gbit/sec. links.

Infineon is announcing the availability of SOCRATES 4, a low-power, SHDSL transceiver that combines four SHDSL channels on a single device targeted at multichannel applications such as high-density line cards used in DSLAMs and DLCs.

Broadcom (nasdaq: BRCM) will be giving behind-closed-doors demonstrations in its private room. The demos will feature some of the following technology: Broadcom's EyeOpener Adaptive Equalization Technology switch-and-router backplanes, which can now reliably transfer data at 10Gbit/sec. using four copper traces; the BCM8011, which provides a 10Gbit Ethernet link to optical MANs and LANs; and a V-thernet demo including the V-thernet Switch product family.