Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Agere Systems | Subject: Chips for Sonet/SDH
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 19 October 2004
Sonet evolves resiliency, services and
integration
Emerging trends in "old reliable" Sonet equipment focus on resiliency, services, and integration, says Giovanni Cintorrino from Agere Systems Telecommunications Division.
Synchronous optical network (Sonet)/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) equipment is one of the "old reliable" technologies of the maturing telecommunications equipment industry Sonet is intended for use in North America and SDH is better suited for the types of networks outside North America
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 24 Oct 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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Since the early 1990s this telecomms transmission standard has been on a continuous rise to prominence.
Unlike many telecomms technologies that bounce on and off our radar screens, Sonet/SDH is real, here and now, and has been for several years.
As this type of complicated and noncommodity equipment has matured, and as it continues to get deployed for broadband access applications, Sonet/SDH has in recent months been undergoing significant changes.
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One major trend centres on the interrelated goals of building new and more network resiliency, more bandwidth on demand and more revenue-generating services into Sonet/SDH equipment.
The second trend focuses on Sonet/SDH equipment and chip integration that is driving reduction in Sonet/SDH equipment and chip costs.
The first trend aims to optimise delivery of services relative to the revenue generated by those services.
For example, residential best-effort Internet access, meaning not guaranteed, ranks as a low-revenue service that typically does not require a high degree of protection.
By contrast, voice service remains critical, time-sensitive service that generates substantial revenue and requires setting priorities for delivering and rapidly restoring the network when an outage occurs.
Example: A 9-1-1 emergency voice call has to get through because it could be a life or death situation.
Providing the same type of network protection for both these services, time-critical and not time-critical, is uneconomical and inefficient.
New resiliency-on-demand technology provides network operators the flexibility to tailor the protection requirements on a per-service level, resulting in the most "bang for the buck" in their network expenditures.
Simultaneously, consumers obtain precisely the service level they pay for.
In addition, such new technology remains flexible enough to dynamically change the level of protection and priority for a customer service, allowing on-demand resiliency and quality of service.
Furthermore, chips are on the market that support legacy services such as transparent local area network services, Ethernet private line services, and Sonet/SDH transport services.
Such chips also support new services including Ethernet virtual provide line services and Internet Protocol packet-aware services.
The key to Sonet/SDH market growth centres on products that tailor services to meet the needs of preferred customers, to identify high-priority traffic, and to create products that deliver a higher quality customer experience.
The second major trend centres on the continuing technology enhancements surrounding the Sonet/SDH chips.
They are becoming highly integrated with Ethernet, framing, and network processor traffic management-functions typically executed on separate chips.
This integration offers substantial Sonet/SDH equipment cost reductions.
The traffic management capability within Sonet/SDH equipment is a service enabler.
Similar in concept to a global package delivery company, Sonet/SDH offers the equivalent of overnight, next day, first class, and bulk delivery options, at different prices.
Such chips address a major industry challenge of extending multiservice protocol layer switching and Ethernet service delivery over Sonet/SDH in access and metro networks.
These chips are typically referred to as Ethernet over Sonet/SDH offerings.
Such a chip maps data into Sonet/SDH.
In such a chip, Ethernet and IP frames received from the internal bus can be encapsulated and then mapped into Sonet/SDH signals.
Economies of bandwidth can be realised using virtual concatenation, a special technology tailored for efficient Ethernet application.
In Sonet/SDH framer chips, furthermore, a trend has emerged in which clock data recovery functions have been integrated.
Typically, framer chips have used separate clock data recovery functions.
This integration translates to fewer chips, lower costs, and reduced size of Sonet equipment.
Building single-chip solutions that can handle more different Sonet speeds marks another integration trend.
For example, chips are coming on the market that can handle OC-3 (155Mbit/s), OC-12 (622Mbit/s), OC-48 (5Gbit/s) and OC-192 (10Gbit/s) speeds.
Previously, two chips have been required to handle these four speeds.
Such integration also enables a large amount of reuse of software within single line cards and a family of them, instead of having to write new software for each line card.
This chip reduction is key for reducing costs of Sonet/SDH systems, which in the telecomms market is so crucial for survival as the market continues to consolidate.
And it's key that such chips enable design of a single equipment line card that supports all Sonet/SDH rates.
This consolidation reduces manufacturer's development costs and lowers service providers' inventory-carrying and maintenance costs.
Such integration enables equipment manufacturers typical equipment used today-about the size of three pizza boxes set side by side, down to one integrated system the size of one pizza box.
The key to winning sales of chips for Sonet/SDH applications remains as it has for several years: reduce the price per port and power per port, and increase line card channel density - squeezing more voice and channel processing into the same size chip.
In the Sonet/SDH market, the integration of equipment continues.
With Sonet/SDH applications being more widely used in access applications, Sonet/SDH add/drop multiplexer equipment is merging with digital subscriber line access multiplexers.
DSLAM uplinks are converting from Ethernet to Sonet/SDH.
One chip company is in the future going to supply most of the chips on a Sonet/SDH line card for one equipment manufacturer customer, as opposed to several chip companies typically providing different chips for such cards currently.
Equipment manufacturers have an incentive to reduce the number of component suppliers they work with because it costs them less in time and resources, and ensures a higher likelihood of more reliable systems.
They want one strategic supplier they can count on.
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