Quellan Cancels Gigabit Noise

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- IMAPS CONFERENCE -- Quellan Inc., a leading developer of GHz spectrum analog ICs, is demonstrating the ability to cancel unwanted crosstalk noise in a multi-Gigabit backplane. This cancellation technology demonstration shows an existing noise-impaired equalized backplane passing 1,000,000 bits before an error occurs to a throughput of 1 trillion bits before an error occurs -- a bit error rate (BER) improvement of one million times from 10-6 to 10-12. This will enable backplane speeds to increase from 1.25Gbps to 6.25Gbps with BER performance approaching 10-17. As part of an April 2003 agreement, Quellan announced that National Semiconductor will produce the products in its fabrication facility.

Similar in principle to the technology used in consumer noise canceling headphones, Quellan's technology cancels noise at frequencies in the GHz range, which is 1 million times higher in frequency than the audio noise canceled in consumer headphones. As system and network traffic bandwidth increases, the aging backplanes in the field -- those passive chassis that carry signals between cards -- become increasingly unable to transport signals from card to card. The noise that is coupled from pin-to-pin on the connectors increases with frequency and at the rates required, renders equipment inoperable. Since this equipment has been installed for years, it cannot be removed to be upgraded.

Quellan's chips allow the infrastructure to stay in place and by incorporating chips on new switch cards, speeds of 5 and 6.25 Gigabits per second can be achieved on legacy backplanes. IT managers benefit because they can leave their networks intact, and OEMs benefit by providing higher performance capabilities into existing systems, which greatly reduces development cost and time to market.

"The challenge of upgrading the performance of existing installed network equipment is a major issue and crosstalk noise is the significant barrier to achieving this upgrade", said Tony Stelliga, CEO of Quellan. "Our Collaborative Signal Processing (CSP) chips provide a unique solution to this problem by canceling crosstalk noise. Immediate performance upgrades in the field are now possible, which reduces network downtime and the cost of new equipment."

"Quellan's demonstration today clearly showcases winning technology to address the real and growing issue of crosstalk," said Mike Noonen, vice president and general manager of the PC and Networking Group at National Semiconductor. "Quellan has solved this problem from a systems perspective using analog innovations that are extremely complementary to National Semiconductor's Serializer-Deserializer devices."

Quellan's CSP Real Time (CSP R/T) System is now available to OEMs for performance evaluation of Quellan's technology and to characterize their backplanes. The CSP R/T provides single and dual channel cancellation and a feed forward equalizer for high performance cancellation and system analysis and uses a range of pods that are available for different connector sets.

Quellan Inc.