2001 Ad

Electronic News, Sept 10, 2001 by Gale Morrison

"Most of the parts don't work as advertised, particularly the high-speed electronics. It's in the details of the specs that it gets you. Between the laser driver and the laser itself, the impedance issues, the workings of the high-speed serdes (serializer/deserializer) parts ... It's just a very difficult problem," Denton said.

To answer this need, Network Elements, backed by a 100-person engineering team and more than a $100 million in venture funding, claims it has solved these issues. The company is offering up a road map of modules that includes a two million-gate custom ASIC (not for sale, by the way), protocol configuration software and special attention to which kind of optical lasers are doing the talking.

Also today, N I attendees are going to hear of the wisdom of a system approach when it comes to the switch fabric components from a surprising new combination: NEC Corp. of Tokyo (and its U.S. chip subsidiary NEC Electronics Inc.) and a St. Louis start-up called Erlang Technology Inc.

Erlang today is introducing its switch fabric architecture and the first Erlang Network Element Technology (ENET) family product, the Se switch fabric chipset. NEC (nasdaq: NIPNY) has invested in the spinout of St. Louis' Washington University and is providing ASIC manufacturing, packaging and marketing support for the products. The companies said these will be available from the fab in the current quarter, making them one of the few vendors talking this week about silicon that will be available this year, and not in 2002.

Paul Min, founder and chief scientist of Erlang, struck the systems know-how chord in talks with Electronic News late last month.

"We designed this switching fabric from a systems point of view. We maintained low clock rate, for instance, so that you can bound the jitter and the jitter delay," said Min, who has spent the last 10 years working on these kinds of systems in academic research and in the telecom engineering consortium Bellcore.

"The switching fabric we built, as an example, the OEM actually went ahead and designed the system around it," Min said. "When he got the chip, he popped it in the system, and it worked within a week. We captured many of the difficult things that may arise during system design, and that is something that we feel that we can differentiate ourselves with."

Min said that Erlang's product, like Network Element's, is deployable in a number of places in the network.

"It's a good solution for mid- to high-range architecture -- though remember the mid to high will not stay as mid to high for long," Min said. "Our switch fabric scales to 40 (Gbits/sec.) but it is actually extremely efficient at 10 or 5. It could be widely deployed for the home gateway, or for the head-end equipment for cable plant."

What's notable as well in the Erlang and NEC partnership is that it confirms that the Japanese and Korean electronics firms do not plan on letting North America have this market for itself. NEC's communications strategic business unit is using its deep global reach to capture revenue here, and Mm, a Korean native, has helped the partnership win designs with Korean giant LG and other Korean equipment makers, he said.