Speed with stability for SiGe crosspoint

Philips is claiming a world's first for the speed, jitter performance and feature set of its TZA2060 12.5Gbit/s single-chip asynchronous optical crosspoint switch.

Philips is claiming a world's first for the speed, jitter performance and feature set of its TZA2060 12.5Gbit/s single-chip asynchronous optical crosspoint switch.

The device is based on the company's new QUBiC4'G' silicon-germanium semiconductor technology.

The new generation of optical crossconnect systems for which the TZA2060 is designed will replace older generations of digital crossconnects by enabling switching at native line rates up to 12.5Gbit/s.

Optical crossconnect systems are one of the fastest growing application domains in optical networking.

The TZA2060's unsurpassed performance in power consumption and jitter also makes it suitable for other applications such as backplane switching, storage area networks, high-speed test equipment and video switching.

"As Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and network operators upgrade their networks to handle the new generation of streaming media and broadband data communication services, the need for optical exchange equipment that routes data from one place to another will proliferate exponentially", said Jos Lammerts, general manager networking infrastructure at Philips Semiconductors.

"The lack of suitable network termination and switching equipment has so far prevented such organizations from taking full advantage of the potential bandwidth and scalability of available network technologies.

The TZA2060 will be a key component in cost efficient and scalable applications such as ADM and crossconnect in DWDM systems".

The TZA2060 is a 20 x 20 asynchronous crosspoint switch with unicast, multicast and broadcast switching capabilities.

Its unique internal design, which leverages the ultra-high-speed performance of QUBiC4'G' transistors, maintains highly symmetrical rise and fall times and reduces jitter to less than 2ps per switch.

This extremely low jitter level enables designers to cascade as many as three TZA2060 switches without the need to insert clock/data recovery and retiming logic in between them.

In complex systems such as Clos switches, the result is a significantly lower component count, printed circuit board area, and equipment manufacturing costs.

The TZA2060 also facilitates efficient power management.

It operates from a single 2.5V supply and consumes less than 4W, resulting in typical power dissipations of 16W/Tbit of aggregated bandwidth.

Its innovative design not only means that the TZA2060 consumes much less power than alternative solutions with similar aggregate bandwidths.

It also allows the routing of much smaller amplitude signals, resulting in significantly lower parasitic coupling within the system.

All the TZA2060's 12.5Gbit/s serial data inputs and outputs are CML compatible.

Evaluation samples of the TZA2060 are available now, together with dedicated application support from Philips that will include fully functional demonstrations of the part with all associated external components and a backplane connector.

In volumes of 1k pieces the TZA2060 is expected to sell for around US $1950.

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