Entridia Intros Optical Router Chips

IRVINE, CA--- Entridia, a leading provider of dedicated routing silicon for converged Internet Protocol networks, today launched the OPERA (Optical Edge Routing Architecture) family of silicon products targeted at Optical IP line aggregation equipment for metropolitan area and service provider backbone networks. The OPERA family includes a complete set of silicon that incorporates route/flow processing, traffic conditioning functions, and includes Entridia's Lightplane Fast Packet Switch fabric. Future OPERA devices due out this year will address various aggregation points within the network supporting up to OC-192c speeds, with OC-768c solutions available in Q1, 2001.

The OPERA family of chips is comprised of two distinct groups: line-card silicon and backplane silicon. Entridia's line-card silicon devices integrate user-configurable route and flow processing, along with sophisticated traffic engineering mechanisms, and allow for line-rate policing. Entridia's patented pre-emptive multi-field packet analysis enables deep packet examination, line-rate tagging and flow classification that is extensible past OC-768c. The integration of the functions onto a single monolithic device is accomplished via Entridia's low-latency, ultra-fast messaging architecture that guarantees line-rate forwarding of 40-byte packets with no performance tradeoffs.

"The objective is to supply all the building blocks to system OEMs to provide a scalable solution for the new IP infrastructure," said Paramesh Gopi, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Entridia. "Our view is that the most scalable architecture will have distributed route/flow processing and traffic engineering at the line-card level, and the backplane will be optimized for scalable transport. We are putting in place these pieces for system OEMs, to enable them to build next-generation IP services with an unprecedented combination of low power, space savings and high performance."

The backplane silicon group consists of Entridia's Lightplane Fast Packet Switch devices. These highly integrated silicon switch fabrics interface with Entridia's line-card devices via standard serial backplane interface drivers; both optical and electrical paths allow for non-blocking, scalable switching.

http://www.entridia.com/news/announce/2000501.html