PairGain shipping HDSL chipsets to Motorola

Electronic News, Feb 27, 1995 by Jim DeTar

TUSTIN, CALIF. - PairGain Technologies, here, has begun shipping High-Bit-Rate Digital Subscriber Line (HDSL) chipsets to Motorola under a deal disclosed recently involving wireless local loop, on-premises telephony and radio handset products. The agreement - said to be the first between the two vendors - calls for the chipsets to be used by Motorola's PCS Infrastructure division for integration into its Teledensity wireless products, whose applications include wireline replacement for telephone service providers, wireless in-building telephone systems for both business and residential subscribers and portable phones.

PairGain said its HDSL, technology, running at 784Kbits, is designed to enable Teledensity to connect directly into local telephone exchanges and transmit at fiber quality bit-error rates over traditional twisted-pair copper wires at very high speeds. In telephony, the generic term "pair gain" applies to a variety of methods for conditioning copper for better quality and/or higher speed transmissions. In the Motorola scenario, such a method (here via the HDSL technology) ostensibly would be used to accommodate the multiple paths of radio frequency traffic generated by the telecom end user equipment.

PairGain president Howard Flagg told Electronic News "In the near term we are getting the visibility of the technology in all sorts of applications. It is showing an excellent example of how the technology fits in a variety of applications. We don't expect a whole lot to happen in 1995 but long term this can be quite a viable way of deploying telephone service around the world."

Fabless PairGain lists among its foundry partners Philips and Atmel. "We have a design group and send tapes out to foundries. The main component in the chipset Motorola will use is the SPAROW (Signal Processing Adaptive Retriever On Wire) chip, which is made by Philips NV in the Netherlands. Another key component in our products is a gate array made by Atmel.."

Lynn Whittington, Motorola's manager of PCS networks, architecture and standards, said in a separate interview: "We have been working on this technology agreement for three years, during which we were working with mostly all of the HDSL vendors, including PairGain."

Although he stopped short of saying it is an exclusive agreement for PairGain, Mr. Whittington noted, "We're very happy with PairGain's product and future product development plans. They are dedicated to staying at the leading edge."

Although structured as a technology licensing agreement, the deal is actually more of an OEM sourcing pact. "There is licensing involved. I can't get into details but it would be inappropriate to say that Motorola has licensed PairGain's HDSL technology," Mr. Whittington noted. "There are multiple facets to HDSL technology. We have licensed the part we needed and the part we didn't need we didn't license. What it amounts to is that we will be buying parts from them. We are basically working with PairGain to integrate their product into our product. Typically in the past when someone worked with PairGain, they used PairGain's product outside of theirs and cabled them together."

Although the two companies do not have personnel at each other's development sites, they "spend a lot of time visiting each other," according to Mr. Whittington.

Motorola has not yet announced any customers for its Teledensity product line, but the company is currently engaged in a technology trial with Southwest Bell that started in the second half of last year and runs through the end of this year. The agreement between Motorola and PairGain could lead to the purchase by Motorola of an estimated several hundred-thousand units or more a year from PairGain.

PairGain, on the other hand, has been selling its HDSL, technology to regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) and through another licensing partner, Alcatel, for some time.

"We've been doing very well with the telephone companies," Mr. Flagg said. "We work with all of the RBOCs, who use either only PairGain products or predominantly use PairGain. We and Alcatel, which licenses our technology and makes a copy of our product and sells it to Ameritech and U.S. West, together between the two of us have 85- to 90 percent of the market. Between the two companies, we have 40,000 HDSL systems installed in the telephone companies alone.

He said the firm offers two core HDSL lines: the HiGain (a variety of products for telephone companies) and Campus (for private network, on-premise systems, etc). "Motorola will use only the core transceiver chips used in both of those product fines that provide the HDSL transmission capability. The only two companies we sell the (bare) chips to are Alcatel and Motorola. Alcatel has licensed the technology in the telephone market and Motorola has licensed it in the PCS market."

The HiGain products range about $2,000 per pair and Campus products sell for about $5,000 per pair.