Agere Offers Single Chip ADM

ALLENTOWN, Pa. -- Agere Systems (NYSE: AGR.A), the world leader in communications components, today announced the industry's first single-chip, low-power, programmable synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) framer solution for OC-3 to OC-48c optical networks that supports virtual concatenation (VC) and generic framing procedure (GFP) technologies. The add-drop multiplexer (ADM) system-on-a-chip (SoC) integrates a full cross connect, data engine and pointer processor that now supports the new VC and GFP standards which will help boost performance and lower costs for network equipment manufacturers and service providers. The SONET infrastructure is the dominant transport medium in today's optical networks. As the proportion of data traffic increases and different protocols are developed for data encapsulation, SONET is evolving to become more efficient and flexible in supporting new transport services. VC and GFP are two new standards which enable generalized mapping of variable length multi-protocol packets and flexible data transport over SONET networks, reducing overall system costs while improving flexibility and efficiency. Based upon its market-leading TADM042G5 device, Agere's new TADMVC2G5 framer chip is designed for OC-48c multi-protocol and ATM switches, routers, aggregation equipment, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment, voice gateways, next-generation digital subscriber line access multiplexers (DSLAMs) and 3G wireless infrastructure applications. Agere Systems is a key technical pioneer and lead participant in establishing the international virtual concatenation standard, resulting in global availability of a technology providing expanded features and capabilities for networks today. Virtual concatenation allows the grouping of any number of STS-1 channels for transporting data streams regardless of the type of data packet being transported, such as Ethernet, Internet protocol (IP), or asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), substantially extending the transport efficiency of existing SONET infrastructure. GFP allows flexible and efficient adaptation of multiple protocols for transmission over SONET networks. GFP has extremely low overhead requirements and robust frame delineation qualities. As a result, GFP makes it easier for service providers to perform switching tasks, avoiding overhead-intensive flag-based adaptation schemes, such as packet over SONET, used for IP router interconnection over wide area networks (WAN). This simplifies component complexity, lowers chip count and space while reducing equipment size and manufacturing costs. "With increasing multiple transport protocols, service providers need an efficient method to support them, such as point-to-point protocol (PPP) and high-level data link control (HDLC)," said Brian hreder, director of marketing, Agere Systems. "Since Agere's TADMVC2G5 chip incorporates GFP and VP, network efficiency can be greatly enhanced. "For example, transporting a gigabit Ethernet signal over SONET using existing transport structures would result in a 42 percent bandwidth efficiency when using an STS- 48c contiguously concatenated channel. With VC, we can utilize 95 percent of the transport channel for data applications and the remaining six STS-1 channels for voice applications," said Schreder. "In addition, service providers will now have the ability to supply bandwidth to meet specific application transport requirements. Moreover, the service provider's job is now a little easier since the network only requires upgrade at the path terminating endpoints and not at every network node." Agere's TADMVC2G5 framer device integrates a full pointer processor, an STS-1 granularity cross-connect and a packet-cell data engine with VC and GFP, providing a system-on-chip solution for ADM functionality in PPP or ring optical networks. In addition, the device addresses the merging of time division multiplexing (TDM) and data networks within a single device. "Agere's latest framer devices are among the industry's most integrated solutions for next-generation multi-protocol networks," said Schreder. "By integrating VC and GFP, Agere's new TADM chip offers a new level of functionality that will boost the efficiency of multi-protocol transport over traditional SONET networks." "Carriers are looking for a highly integrated product that supports the growth of Ethernet and helps build interoperable networks using their legacy equipment," said Allan Armstrong, director of optical transport semiconductor research at RHK. "Agere's latest framer device provides this type of integration by using features such as virtual concatenation and a built-in STS-1 cross connect which allows gigabit Ethernet to be provisioned on dynamically assigned STS-1 circuits." The TADMVC2G5 can interface with Agere's SuperMapper(tm) device and ATM port controller (APC(tm)) for full-line port card solutions at multiple rates. All of these devices come with a software device manager that includes device drivers and a generically defined application program interface (API) for easy migration across the company's other chip solutions. Agere Systems