Agere Systems Inc. is arming itself with embedded memory in an effort to gain share in the OC-48 network processor turf battle. Allentown, Pa.-based Agere is squaring off against Intel Corp. and IBM Corp. -- which have been intensely cutting prices and adding features at the mainstream OC-48 level this spring--and segment pioneer Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC).
Bill Klein, network processor product marketing manager at Agere's Austin site, last week told Electronic News exclusively that the next PayloadPlus network processor would offer serious embedded memory, something the company has not focused on before and something upstarts EZChip and Silicon Access Networks have designed-in from the start.
"Initially, our focus was performance and really doing the things the customer needed to do. Certain feature sets needed to be supported, and there had to be the performance overhead to add more features later," Klein said. "And just due to pure physics, there's certain trade-offs you have to make.
"But memory bandwidth is the big bottleneck in these applications, and we've addressed that in the next set of devices. Our new products are going more that route [of embedding memory]. We're definitely adding some things there," he said. Klein did not want to go into too much detail on the new products before their June introduction. But the quickly added the embedded memory is no panacea In traffic management, which is one of the things we do really well, you have to do a lot of packet buffering," Klein said. "And to do that well, you are going to have to store those packets off-chip. There's no way--I don't care what you do--that you are buffering 64 megabytes of data on-chip."
Not that customers weren't pulling for the earlier Payload Plus NPUs; Agere has clocked 60 PayloadPlus design wins thus far. Today the company will announce that Lucent Technologies Inc. is using Agere components for the first time in its Stinger digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM) platform for an IP2000 module that can be added to the platform. The IP2000 add-on allows for the use of Gigabit Ethernet communications to bring video delivery to a DSL system.
Agere is preparing to ship 10Gbit/sec. (OC-192) network processors by the end of this year, Klein said. These will mark the shift of Agere's manufacturing from foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) to internal manufacturing.
Klein said he is not overly concerned about Intel's giant outlay and ambition in the NPU space. He and his team have been hard-pressed to find a specific OEM that has chosen Intel.
Still, every NPU player is rightfully concerned about the wrenching contraction in telecom spending and even the number of telecom companies. Klein said the turmoil is not over in this respect.
"Given carriers' current predictions for spending, the storm is not over," Klein said. "In my mind, that makes it more important than ever to build the right system.
"There's now a lot more focus on which programs OEMs are keeping and if we've got something they are really demanding, versus the old model of, 'We've got a cool idea; let's build it. We think they'll buy it,'" he said. Klein also said that the dust is starting to settle, and what's clear is that support for legacy networks is important, too.
"For awhile people said it's going to be all Ethernet. We had some newer carriers making promises of all-Ethernet. Clearly, that has at least temporarily gone away. What you are left with is the ILECs who need to support the legacy networks. So we need to support interacting with legacy equipment," he said. And that's a positive thing for Agere, as he sees it.
"Frankly for us that's been good; we're hurt less because one of our big strengths is true multiprotocol services, including ATM processing because there are inherent things that are difficult to do in ATM, such as segmentation and reassembly of packets into cells and vice versa," Klein said. He said Agere's NPUs are engineered with that in mind.
Klein said recent pronouncements by analysts that networking gear heavyweights Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc., among a few others, are not giving up their ASIC development in favor of NPUs carry some water
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