Transceivers come into play: Teams work to integrate coveted comm technology

Electronic News, Nov 19, 2001 by Gale Morrison

Design activity and interest in various types of silicon to interface to the optical network is at an all-time high.

And, as is typical as an application segment matures, the activity is no longer centered inside large integrated device manufacturers. Companies have surfaced that concentrate their business in these transceivers, framers and serializer/deserializer functions.

One driver behind this trend is the massive amount of optical communications capacity that was put in place by the new, deregulated telecoms. According to Bob Bailey, CEO of Burnaby, British Columbia-based communication IC giant PMC-Sierra Inc., plenty of that fiber is all but stranded until the electronics are put in place to talk to it.

Last week, up-start intellectual property (IP) provider Leda Systems Inc. reported availability of a line of "LaSer" 10/40Gbit/sec. serial link transceivers for applications that include Infiniband, SONET/SDH, Fibre Channel, l0Gbit Ethernet and several optical carrier (OC) network standards. (Fun fact: Leda is based in Piano, Texas, with designers in the Asian nation of Armenia as well as in Toronto.)

Leda is offering these new transceiver designs for use by any system-on-a-chip designers in need. These interfaces to optics are built by specialist analog and mixed signal designers. It's often full-custom work and not possible with the friendly, cell-driven ASIC flows most designers use. San Diego-based NurLogic and San Francisco-based TriCN are two other companies asserting themselves in this space. Leda, a company relatively unknown a year ago, said it has sold to more than 50 customers, including Agilent Technologies, Intel and LSI Logic.

Dozens of semiconductor companies are scaling the optical interface wall right now. Over the next year, hundreds of designs will come to market to meet the needs of networking equipment makers looking for off-the-shelf parts to process data at the optical speeds now possible.

These semiconductors have to interface with the OSI optical communications standards OC-48, OC-192, and OC-768, and they are meant to do so by the Optical Internetworking Forum's (OIF) SPI standards. The OIF has now worked out SPI-3, SPI-4 and SPI-5; semiconductor vendors and their IP suppliers are racing to bring silicon engineered for those physical links to market.