Synergy, PMC ready more ATM devices

Electronic News, Jan 9, 1995 by Jim DeTar

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- Looking to a rebound in the market for asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) products from lackluster sales in 1994, companies are beefing up their ATM portfolios in an attempt to leverage potential opportunities in 1995. Synergy Semiconductor will this week introduce what it is billing as the industry's first single-chip 622Mbit Synchronous Optical Network (SONET)/ATM transceiver; separately, PMC Sierra is also planning to roll out its own 622Mbit ATM chip next week.

Synergy is sampling the device and said it already has a design win for the new ATM chip with Alcatel. Although Alcatel helped Synergy define the specifications for the chip and plans to use the device in its central switching equipment, Synergy is free to sell it in the merchant market. Synergy is offering an integrated SONET, ATM and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) device that combines both transmit and receive functions (at OC-12 or 622.08Mbit/sec. speeds) on a single IC. Called the SY69712, the 100-pin PowerQuad2 packaged device is Synergy's first product specifically designed to address SONET/ATM applications.

The SY69712 is manufactured using Synergy's 1.2-micron, deep trench-isolation bipolar process called ASSET (All Spacer Separated Element Transistor) along with design techniques that the company said provide circuit isolation to support two or more low-jitter phased lock loops (PLLs) with virtually no interaction.

"It's the first time that a complete transmit and receive function has been integrated in a single IC at OC-12 rates," said Raj Patel, Synergy's director of business development. "Our ability to integrate multiple PLL's on a single IC, while meeting the SONET jitter requirements, is an example of our value-added in this market." Application areas include transmission systems and test equipment, ATM-based SONET networks, broadband cross-connect equipment and fiber optic test equipment.

The SY69712, on the receiving end, recovers the clock from the incoming serial bit stream, aligns the data and the recovered clock, and converts the serial data to parallel bytes. It also has framing (user selectable) logic that recognizes the beginning of SONET/SDH frames in the incoming data. On the transmission side, the device performs the clock synthesis function using a 51.84Mhz reference clock to generate the outgoing OC-12 signal. The SY69712 features two PLLs used, one for clock recovery and another for clock synthesis, to perform both the receive and transmit functions.

The device requires a single 5-Volt power supply and offers lock detect (for clock recovery) and frame detect (frame delineation) outputs. Power dissipation is two watts (typical). Pricing for the SY69712 is $283 each in quantities of 100 and $189 in quantities of 1,000; it is expected to be available in production quantities by February.

Meanwhile, PMC Sierra is preparing to unveil an addition to its ATM product portfolio. Although the company declined to provide product details, sources said PMC Sierra will roll out a 622Mbit ATM solution in conjunction with other networking companies including Fore Systems. Regarding his company's impending ATM chip announcement, Vern Little, PMC Sierra manager of LAN products, said, "We will make a high-speed ATM, multivendor announcement with multiple component vendors. We developed the products and worked with complementary component vendors to offer a solution for ATM."

Commenting generally on the market for high-speed ATM products, Mr. Little said, "We don't see any activity beyond 622Mbits ... Most ATM switch cores are designed to handle up to 622Mbits and would have to be redesigned to handle beyond 622Mbits. The bulk of the market is at 155Mbit for ATM ports. That will migrate to 622Mbits primarily for backbones and public network trunking."

PMC Sierra believes the market will rapidly migrate up to 155Mbits for ports and will stop at that level, he said, leaving little room for emerging inexpensive, stopgap products such as ATM at 25Mbits.

"Higher speed ATMs will probably find their first applications in public networks. We see the port market being dominated by 155Mbit--and it will continue to be so. All ATM vendors are buying for performance, which means 155Mbit. The average desktop will become Pentium-class and all general business applications will move to 155Mbit."

At the physical layer, PMC Sierra dominates the market, according to Mr. Little. "We estimate our market share at more than 90 percent at the physical layer. In 1993 we saw an initial flurry of ATM. The market hit the doldrums in '94 as people built systems and got them up to trial and were fixing bugs. In the last quarter of '94 it really took off again and we see a strong market in '95. Companies like Fore Systems will do well."

In addition, other industry executives told Electronic News in recent interviews that they see strong growth in the ATM market in the coming year. "ATM will be a winner," said Alfred J. Stein, chairman, president and CEO of chipset and ASIC vendor VLSI Technology. "We favor that over FDDI and Fast Ethernet. Because it can do data, video and audio it is going to be the bigger standard, the bigger volume."