Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Zarlink Semiconductor | Subject: ZL50061 family
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 10 November 2003
Mid-density TDM switches boast many
features
A new family of mid-density TDM switching devices offers the industry's widest range of per-stream and per-channel programmable features with exceptional jitter tolerance.
Zarlink Semiconductor has launched a benchmark-setting family of mid-density TDM switching devices Offering the industry's widest range of per-stream and per-channel programmable features with exceptional jitter tolerance, the flexible ZL50061 family improves performance, simplifies board-level design, and reduces the cost of medium-capacity carrier equipment
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 7 Feb 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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"The ZL50061 TDM switch family supports a wide range of applications, from high-growth wireless voice and IP-based networks, as well as traditional wired networks", said Andrew Faulkner, Product Line Director, TDM Switching, Network Communications business unit, Zarlink Semiconductor.
"We are offering both basic and richly featured mid-density TDM devices, giving engineers the flexibility of choosing only the features they need to best support their designs".
Zarlink's platform consists of three 16,384-channel devices, one 12,288-channel chip - the world's only 12K TDM switch - and an 8182-channel switch.
Offering the industry's widest range of nonblocking, mid-density TDM/TSI switching ICs, three devices within the ZL50061 family provide pin-to-pin compatibility with Zarlink's proven MT90869/70/71 family.
Backward compatibility permits customers to upgrade the performance and reduce board-level size of their existing designs without the need for further software development.
With a range of switching capacities and data rates, and a host of features including per-stream programmable data rate conversion, input delay, output advancement control, and packaging options, Zarlink's platform delivers more features and better performance than competing mid-density TDM switches.
The ZL50061 family achieves exceptional jitter tolerance of 17ns at datarates up to and including 16Mbit/s, and 14ns for 32Mbit/s traffic.
High jitter tolerance means Zarlink's TDM switches can be timed directly from the backplane's clock and frame pulses, eliminating the need for intermediary chips such as CPLDs and FPGAs.
If reference switching or holdover functionality is required, high jitter tolerance allows designers to choose from a wide range of low-cost digital PLLs.
As a result, designers can deploy the most cost-effective timing architecture for a given application.
With TDM devices offering 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32Mbit/s per-stream rate conversion, the output data rate can easily be programmed to differ from the input data rate.
This permits the TDM device to directly transmit information between peripheral components without requiring intermediary FPGAs, glue logic, and other external circuitry, thus simplifying board design and reducing the cost of networking equipment.
For example, when used in a multi-service access platform delivering T1/E1 service, the ZL50060/61 devices can simultaneously interface with a network access card running at 8Mbit/s, a DSP (digital signal processor) mezzanine operating at 16Mbit/s, and an echo-cancellation mezzanine running at 2Mbit/s.
If a mezzanine card is replaced with a lower density card, then the switching device's datarate is simply reprogrammed to the appropriate rate.
Zarlink's mid-density TDM switching platform is now in volume production and offered in a variety of size and packaging options.
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