Centillium Tackles MSAN

FREMONT, Calif. -- Centillium Communications (Nasdaq: CTLM - News) today released Entropia(TM) III-C, the newest member of its suite of system-on-chip (SoC) Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions. Aimed at fast-growing multi-service access network (MSAN) applications such as POTS replacement, Entropia III-C scales the market-proven features and performance advantages of the company's flagship system into a smaller-sized, highly integrated chipset with cost structures and channel densities that squarely target the requirements of business communications and subscriber loop infrastructures. "Our newest chipset marks a significant expansion of our reach in the booming market for voice services over the IP backbone," said Didier Boivin, vice president of marketing, Centillium. "By extending technologies proven out in demanding, high-volume central office environments, we've scaled an innovative, best-in-class platform to bring superior performance, power consumption and service quality to new network access applications as well as legacy telco facilities."

With a single-chip design and low per-channel cost, the Entropia III-C provides a powerful and cost-efficient platform for deployment within MSAN and Digital Loop Carrier (DLC) environments. Carrier-proven algorithms serve to maximize voice quality, while the highly integrated design reduces power consumption compared to other approaches. The chipset's high degree of integration minimizes external component counts and PCB layers to reduce overall system bill-of-materials (BOM) costs. Trimming BOM costs even further are an integrated internal host processor and internal security engine, as well as reference POTS drivers and on-chip call-processing software -- carrier-class features that simplify linecard design and serve to reduce cost-per-port. For OEMs who wish to operate via an external host processor, the system integrates a PCI bus.

True Channel Density

Further distancing Entropia III-C from other solutions, the SoC reliably delivers 72 LBR channels of voice independent of the codecs in use. While other solutions achieve up to 72 channels with bandwidth-friendly compressed codecs, their capacity degrades to levels as low as 30 channels per card when bandwidth-intensive uncompressed codecs are processed. In contrast, Entropia III-C offers available support for all wireline and wireless codecs while assuring carriers of the maximum 72-channel capacity regardless of the mix of codecs in routing. As a result, Entropia III-C economizes on costs and physical space requirements by supporting fewer linecards to manage comparable voice traffic.

"Our upcoming annual VoIP market report will forecast steady growth in 'low-density' aggregation media gateways, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 62 percent through 2011," said Steve Rago, principal analyst, iSuppli. "This is the market opportunity that versatile, low-density processors like Centillium's latest Entropia offering seek to capitalize."

Centillium Communications Inc.