MUNICH -- Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX), a leading provider of communications ICs and fiber optics components, today unveiled its Rhea™ Resilient Packet Ring media access controller (MAC), a packet-optimized transport engine that implements the Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP) for ring-based fiber optic networks. The Rhea MAC will enable the deployment of the first generation of 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) OC-192 Resilient Packet Rings (RPRs) in metropolitan area networks (MANs) and wide area networks (WANs). The Rhea Resilient Ring MAC implements SRP technology for ring-based packet internetworking that is open and freely available as IETF Informational RFC 2892. It makes more efficient use of available bandwidth than fixed-time-slot protocols by statistically multiplexing traffic. Furthermore, it delivers scalability, reliability, and simplicity to packet-based MANs and WANs. Industry analyst firm Gartner Dataquest last year projected that RPR SRP semiconductor market revenues will grow by 198 percent between 2000 and 2005, representing a large potential $175.5 million in revenues by 2005."The Rhea MAC, Infineon’s initial entry into the RPR market, will pave the way for additional products with even greater degrees of integration, functionality and capabilities to meet growing market demand," said Christian Scherp, Vice President of Marketing of Infineon’s Optical Networking Business Unit. "Creating solutions to enable RPR networks is another step in achieving our goal of delivering standards-based products to the optical networking industry. The Rhea MAC is a significant addition to our 10 Gbps product portfolio, which allows service providers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy revenue-generating networks."Infineon Technologies AG