Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Agere Systems
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 18 November 2005
Hot ride at Network Systems Design
Conference
Charlie Hartley from Agere Systems gives his perspective on the recent Network Systems Design Conference.
While in an airport en route to the Network Systems Design Conference (NSDC), I stumbled on one of those tacky Mexican restaurants and ordered a basket loaded with red, black, and white chips with hot salsa dip I wolfed down 60 or 70 of those sizzling crunchies and washed them down by gulping two large glasses of Coke and another full glass of water
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Mar 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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Then I went racing around looking for a water fountain.
My mouth was on fire - just the feeling I was after.
What does any of this have to do with the Network Systems Design Conference, I hear you asking?.
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Hear me out.
The next morning I was having breakfast with Lee Goldberg, Editor of analoguezone.com.
During this conversation Agere's Mark Cieri called my cellphone to pre-brief Lee about Agere's announcement that went out this past Monday.
The company for whom I work announced that ZTE has chosen Agere's APP300 network processor for its Internet protocol digital subscriber line access multiplexer (IP DSLAM) access applications.
Cieri, Director of Business Development for Agere's Telecom Division, was going over with Lee using my phone the Agere point about how Agere's reusable, easily programmable software was a major reason ZTE chose company's chip.
"Oh, I get it, it's not about the chips, but the salsa", said Lee, playing on words to show he understood one of our key messages.
His play on words matched Agere's commentary about the NPU market the past several years.
"It's not just about the chips but the software" that determine the value that network processors deliver.
I thought I had had enough salsa, software, and chips for one trip.
Then I heard Agere's representatives at NSDC explaining to the press how we offer our wireline and wireless equipment manufacturer customers the APP300 with both prepackaged, production-worthy base software plus a software development kit so they can easily add their own "secret sauce" to their products.
At this point I knew I hit on a column idea to play with.
You're the lucky person to have met me at this hot spot.
OK, enough about hot and secret sauces.
Now on to the automotive flavour emitting from the event.
Agere's Rob Munoz, a Systems Engineer with the Telecom Division, explained to a reporter how Agere's network processor offered a DSLAM maker the ability to remain, in a sense: "in the driver's seat of the car, with the flexibility to change course at high speeds".
Translated, this means such a manufacturer can start with the prepackaged network processor software and easily use it, modify it, or add some "secret sauce" features to it without having to give back control of the car (chip and software) to Agere or one or more third-party partners.
In Agere's case, more than half of Agere's NPU users customise the base software that Agere provides to help differentiate their products, said Munoz.
Giving back control costs manufacturers much more in time, money, loss of differentiation, and flexibility than maintaining control of the software and its upgrades themselves.
In a figurative sense, if you are not driving your own race car, you can't drive your differentiation.
From a network processor provider's perspective, the goal is to increase the velocity with which equipment manufacturers and service providers can offer services to customers.
The speed at which such services can be offered and delivered are directly related to the revenues such providers can generate.
Service providers are being forced to radically upgrade their networks to fend off competitors and grow the revenue they receive per subscriber.
Intense pressure on service providers is translating to corresponding pressures on equipment builders.
Conditions are especially challenging in the access market, where equipment must simultaneously become faster, smarter, and cheaper.
Network processors are fulfilling a critical need in the access market because such manufacturers want flexibility to accommodate changes over time and they need to move from only supporting "best effort" traffic to enable quality of service for lucrative triple play voice/data/video services.
Likewise, equipment makers can no longer afford to implement point solutions; instead they need to rely on platforms that allow them to build multiple cards and multiple systems from the same base.
By getting a network processor and easily extensible prepackaged base software from a single supplier, they can more easily focus their efforts and investment on differentiating their products in an increasingly competitive market environment.
During the event, one panel focused on applications for network processors in metro applications, such as the Agere APP600 network processor chip that does twice the work per packet as the company's previous APP500 at the same bandwidth of 5Gbit/s.
Agere's Dave Sonnier, Chief Technology Officer for the Telecom Division, said during the panel that network processor software should only have to specify policies and not be burdened with the mechanisms to implement the policies and achieve the goals.
Sonnier described the network processor in something akin to human supervisors.
In a network processor, he said: "lots of bossing around is going on and special requests made, such as 'I don't want IPV6 on this frame', 'take out these four bytes and replace with eight bytes', and 'I don't need MPLS header any more'".
Bossy supervisors, chips and salsa, service velocity, holding tight to the steering wheel and flights with stopovers in cities other than my destination - yes, I found this year's Network Systems Design Conference to be quite a hot ride.
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