PMC-Sierra Gets MAN Up to Speed

Electronic News, Nov 20, 2000 by Tom Murphy

OC-48 transceiver, PHY concentrators upgrade installed fiber optic strands

With an ever-increasing number of corporate LANs, household DSL connections and next-generation cellular base stations coming into service, the arteries of metro area networks (MANs) are becoming clogged.

As the demand for bandwidth increases, there is an enormous amount of data and voice traffic that has to be routed through expensive fiber optic cables formatted for cell-based asynchronous transfer mode (ATM). But PMC-Sierra Inc. has a set of new chips that will allow carriers to funnel higher bandwidth through those existing channels into the edge and core of networks, the company said.

It can be tremendously expensive to lay new fiber for more bandwidth, according to Jeremy Donovan, analyst with the GartnerGroup Inc.'s Dataquest unit. But by taking the same fiber that's already in the ground and using PMC-Sierra's new POS-PHY Layer 3 solutions and its S/UNI-ATLAS-3200 transceiver, carriers can aggregate several existing lines operating at speeds of l55Mbitlsec. and 622Mbit/sec. into a single line that carries 2.SGbit/sec.

Thus, the Burnaby, British Columbia-based company is not offering angioplasty, but rather a bypass for the congested condition.

What's more, the chips are service-level agnostic, Donovan said, so they can handle traffic that is either cell-based for ATM or packet-based for Internet Protocol (IP) and 10Gbit-over-Ethernet. That should give the chips potential for long service life.

Another reason that many MANs have not been updated to the higher-speed, greater-bandwidth protocols has been lack of the ability to deliver quality of service through packet or IP services.

PMC Sierra recently introduced a couple of new IC solutions designed to deliver quality of service through IP-over-synchronous optical network (SONET).

Donovan says that even though PMC-Sierra reigns supreme in the MAN, the company's packet-over-SONET (POS) solutions may face increasing competition from the trend toward 10Gbit-over-Ethernet. PMC-Sierra most likely will have a solution for 10Gbit-over-Ethernet, but right now the company is not disclosing any details, Donovan said.

System OEMs have a choice of whether to use their own ASIC designs to handle the increased level of traffic or standard products from companies like PMC-Sierra or Applied Micro Circuits Corp. The total market opportunity for companies playing in this space could reach more than $1 billion in 2001, Donovan said.

"Ten-gigabit-over-Ethernet in the metro area network is not happening yet, but it will happen over the next year," Donovan said. "But if you can deliver Internet Protocol quality of service, that will open up a brand new opportunity of packet-over-SONET."

Last week PMC-Sierra introduced an OC-48 transceiver designed to address this issue. One week earlier, the company introduced two POS-PHY Level 3 physical layer products that help aggregate several OC-3 and OC-12 lines onto OC-48 lines.

The company's OC-4 8 transceiver is called the PM7325 S/UNI-ATLAS 3200 for ATM Layer Solution. The extra traffic driven by broadband-access devices is increasing the demand for higher-speed ATM aggregation at the edge and core of the data network, the company stated. The transceiver chip also offers service providers the capability to monitor and manage network traffic.

Taking a standard product approach lets OEMs who are building new network modules and systems get products to market faster, Donovan said. It also allows them to upgrade their systems for higher bandwidth as needed. And, if the trend toward the use of network processors in the data path of networks ever becomes a widespread reality, the PMC-Sierra part has a packet-bypass mode that is designed to allow cell-processing to be handled by an NP or an IP-classification engine, the company said.