A Sony first: enters datacom IC arena

Electronic News, Oct 6, 1997 by Gale Morrison

San Antonio, Texas--Sony Semiconductor of America (SSA) today for the first time enters the data communications IC market with a one-device, 26-port Ethernet switch, the first in a family of PacITman (as in Walkman and Watchman) devices, for networking OEM supply and later on for Sony internal consumption.

The data communications infrastructure segment is the darling of the industry these days, it seems, with the big guns like Texas Instruments and Lucent Technologies and now Motorola focusing in and venture capital money chasing start-ups with Gigabit Ethernet devices still in CAE files.

Dan Krent, SSA director of marketing for data communications products, confirmed that this was a first for the Japanese consumer electronics giant. "Sony has not been in this market until now," he said. The company "has never done a data communications product in its history."

"It's an entirely new business unit and a new style of business for Sony," Mr. Krent said. "The term they use around here is the virtual corporation. And Cadence is a big part of that." Cadence Design Systems, the electronic design automation (EDA) leader, provided design support to Sony on the project and participated last week in briefing Electronic News on today's announcement.

"The Ethernet switch market is the largest in the networking industry," Mr. Krent said, explaining Sony's motivation. "It's the largest both for box-level products and for silicon. We created this product to address that." PacITman is the product family name; the device coming out today is the CXD1700.

"We expect this to be a huge business in the next five years," Mr. Krent said. Addressing the issue of who SSA will face in the segment, he said: "Obviously, we're not alone in the market. The biggest and best next competitor is TI.

"If you asked, 'who are the major players?' It's us and TI." Then there are smaller players like "Galileo, MMC Networks, PMC-Sierra, possibly I-Cube," he said. " We expect to see more at Interop," referring to this week's Networld Interop trade conference in Atlanta.

Mr. Krent said Sony "brought in a new 0.35-micron process," that is "up and running in Japan," at its fab here in San Antonio. Sony achieved working first silicon on the 1-million-gate CXD1700 about two months ago, he said.

Chris Goldstein, a Cadence "solution architect" on the project, described how Cadence came in for the "back-end process of the chip (design)." A small Sony group accomplished the register transfer-level (RTL) design and architectural work, though Cadence was brought in early on, he said.

Cadence's early work was the "planning and tools scenario," and then the synthesis and all the layout work, Mr. Goldstein said. The year-long design process was helped by a T1 communications link between the two groups in the Santa Clara Valley and San Antonio, where "usually two" Cadence engineers did work on-site. At a high point, Cadence had 16 or 18 engineers on the Sony design. Both companies expect the PacITman relationship to continue.

The CXD1700 switch and reference boards are available now in sample quantities, with pricing starting at $150 in 1,000-unit quantities for the part and $675 for the CXD1700-PCB reference board.

The switch IC has 26 ports: 24 10Mbps and two 100Mbps. A switching engine at the center of the CXD1700 contains the look-up and learning processes, memory interface and internal bus control logic. The switch engine, port control modules and memory communicate on an internal 1.28Gbps bus.