ADSL chipset design trends - In-Stat/Insights

Electronic News, Oct 21, 2002 by Sam Lucero

As ADSL BECOMES AN INCREASINGLY MAIN-stream residential broadband access technology, two trends in chipset form factors are becoming increasingly clear. First, on the central office (GO) side of the local loop, chipset vendors are packing ever-more ports onto a single chipset. Current state-of-the-art technology for this trend can be seen in Globespa virata's 24-port Titanium ADSL chipset. Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) has a 16-port product (Anaconda), and all DSLIC companies are at least producing octal,

or 8-port chipsets. These include STMicroelectronics (CopperWing), Infineon Technologies (GEMINAX), Centillium Communications (CopperFlite), Mindspeed Technologies (Zip WireMulti), and Texas Instruments (AC6). Broadcom Corp. has recently bucked this seeming "multiples of eight" port count with the recent introduction of a 12-port product, the BladeRunner.

The key reason for this trend boils down to preserving scarce board space in the DSLAM, which adds to the service provider's top-line revenue amount by enabling more lines to be serviced from a single blade. Some vendors have tried to argue that 8 ports or 16 ports are more than enough and that more would be counterproductive. This argument usually comes from vendors who do not have higher-density products shipping in the market, or as a result of that particular vendor not having a higher-density chipset on the market. In-Stat/MDR believes all vendors are in fact working to increase port density as quickly as possible.

On the consumer side of the local loop, the residential gateway, or so-called peasant router, form factor is emerging as the clear leader for residential ADSL CPE applications. This comes from the growing trend of multiple PC households, where subscribers want to share a broadband connection over a home network. Consequently, DSL IC vendors are increasingly gearing their products for this form factor by integrating security and network processing functions into their chipset designs.

Examples of this include Centillium's Palladia 100, Palladia 200 and Palladia 300 chipset designs. Each is comprised of two chips: an integrated network processor/digital transceiver and an integrated AFE/line driver. They each possess both Ethernet and USB connections and serve as residential gateways and, in the case of the Palladia 300, as an integrated access device (TAD). The Palladia 100 and Palladia 200 are both targeted toward the residential market, with the Palladia 100 being a basic, low-cost home router, while the Palladia 200 is targeted toward more comprehensive SOHO applications, with enough processing capacity to add more security and more advanced networking features. The Palladia 300 is actually targeted more toward small and medium business applications and includes a hardwired security processor to support wire-speed IPSec, VPN, firewall/NAT and hardware encryption.

In-Stat/MDR expects more chipset vendors to follow Conexant's recently announced example of integrating WLAN functionality into its ADSL home router chipset designs. As consumers increasingly network their homes, WLANs for home use will grow in popularity because they are easy to install, inexpensive, don't require new wires, and because of their approach to LANs. Home router vendors will expect their component suppliers to help them enable this functionality.

Sam Lucero is a research analyst for data and voice networking at In-Stat/MDR. He can be reached at slucero@reedbusiness.com. In-Stat/MDR is owned by Reed Business Information, the parent company of Electronic News.