The Atlanta Files - Supercomm 2002 Wrap-Up Part II
by Lee H. Goldberg
In the previous episode, "Life Returns to Normal at Supercomm," our intrepid editor pitted leg muscle and shoe leather against the vast distances within Atlanta's Convention Center to bring you news and gossip from the telecom industry's premier North American event. Join him again now as he rests his feet at the Vitesse booth and contemplates his next move...
Enjoying The Crowds
As those of you who read last week's installment, Supercomm was a breath of fresh air with its bustling aisles and packed technical sessions. In contrast, one of my spies tells me that attendees just barely outnumbered exhibitors at the DAC show in New Orleans last week. Fortunately, this was not the case in Atlanta, although I thought otherwise as I worked my way through crowds across the Convention Center's three cavernous halls to the dozen-and-a-half appointments I had lined up for each day. Note to self: Don't ever try to cover Supercomm in only two days again, or you may not live to regret it.
While not as lavish as years past, Supercomm's exhibitors managed to continue the recent tradition of glitzy booths, cool give-aways, and for those fortunate enough to know where they were, some really nice parties. Rather than clutter up your page here, I've put together an abbreviated list of the non-technical highlights of this year's Supercomm.
When the story paused last week I was in front of the Vitesse booth, watching a live demonstration of their TeraStream switch architecture, a nice thing to see after saying nice things about their chips earlier this year before they sampled.
My next stop was the Mentalink booth, where CEO Francois Crepin filled me in on how they were surviving the tech slump that has stalled most of the VDSL market. It seems that they are leveraging their VDSL expertise to deliver very cost- and power-conscious HDSL4-based T1/E1 products. But Mentalink has not given up on VDSL and recently demonstrated interoperability with Infineon's chip set. In the near-future, Crepin explained, he expects opportunities for VDSL-based "first-mile Ethernet" in enterprise access applications to precede large-scale rollout of "traditional" full-service residential VDSL. About the only bad news at Mentalink was that I managed to somehow leave my camera there. Happily, Caron Tal, director of their Israel operations found it and promised to mail it back to me soon (thanks Caron!!)
SONET's Back In Fashion
My visit to Agere found the company in a much more optimistic mood than last year. It seems that with the resurgence of interest in SONET, they are cashing in on the market for chips that support the virtual concatenation (VC) and generic framing protocols (GFP) that they helped develop. At the show, Agere announced its new "Festino" hardware-software development platform to help accelerate development of systems based on its IP/SONET-friendly PayloadPlus network processor. They say that it should cut development time and effort by up to 90%, and make integration of 3rd-party support middleware much easier as well. The other cool thing at the Agere booth was two full walls of working silicon that took a VoIP call into a multi-gigabit metro SONET ring and back to a simple POTS call on the other side.
The remainder of Tuesday was a blur, with a visit to TI to see their latest VoIP strategies, and take a brief look at their 802.11 WLAN chips that are finding homes in a surprising number of PC cards and residential gateways. A short stop at the STMicro pavilion revealed that they were hard at work on a number of fronts, with the introduction of an ultra-low-power Gigabit Ethernet transceiver that should give Broadcom, Cicada, and Marvell some good competition.
Georgia On The Rise
Wednesday morning rolled around rather early after too many parties, but duty called and I found myself sharing coffee with Elizabeth Judson, Director of Industry Relations for Yamacraw, a unique consortium which partners Georgia's powerful academic and research resources with many high-tech industries, including electronics. The story she told was so interesting that I forgot I was running on four hours of sleep. In its short three-year history it has become the focus of a dynamic movement to bring high-tech jobs and resources to the Atlanta area.
It's amazing how many semiconductor (Broadcom, Cypress, IDT, and National for starters), and electronics-related companies (Including Bell South, Nortel, and Ciena) have set up shop in partnership with Yamacraw near the Georgia Tech campus. They are mostly there to either turn some piece of research into working products, or to engage students in real-life industry with an eye towards recruitment. Time and space do not permit me to tell the full story here, but if you want to find out about this remarkable high-tech economic development effort, you can point your browser to www.yamacraw.org.
Burnaby Comes To Atlanta
Thoroughly wired on way too much coffee, I buzzed over to see my friends at PMC-Sierra. As always, my visit to them was enlightening. Although the Burnaby, Canada-based company is still working on OC-192 solutions, they have wisely observed that for the short run, the bulk of their business will be in providing OC-48 components for upgrades of existing chassis. To drive home the point, they had a demo set up which was rather similar to Agere's except that the wall was full of PMC chips and focused on mapping 2-Gigabit Ethernet channels into VC-ized SONET frames. The lash-up, which ran the GFP protocol, could run the IP-based traffic easily over either its OC-48, or OC-192 line segments. Jean Lamarche, PMC's optical product marketing director, explained that the OC-192 section of their demonstrator could handle either 10-Gigabit Ethernet feeds, or a single 10-Gigabit Ethernet connection.
After stoking up on bottled water, I left the expo center and hiked across the blazing plaza to the Omni where Accelerant was running its demo of their new five-channel, 5-Gbit/s backplane transceiver chip. I was greeted at the Accelerant suite by a couple of honest-to-goodness engineers who led me back to a table piled high with equipment and a collection of boards that simulated various kinds of backplanes.
After demonstrating that all five channels worked in unison on an FR-4 backplane, they demonstrated how the same chip could be used as an intra-box link by driving 10 m of Cat-5 twisted pair, or co-axial cable. Accelerant estimates that you could make a commercially viable 50-Gbit link using a pair of PAM-5 transceivers (2 chips, 10 channels, $100 per side), plus an ordinary 10-m InfiniBand cable (around $100) that could do the job of the $1500 short-haul fiber optic links currently used, and for a fraction of the 20 W the laser modules would require.
After wandering back to the expo center, I dropped in on Aware to watch a demonstration of their single-ended, and double-ended line probing techniques for DSL systems. In these times when DSL providers are having to trim costs to survive, it's great to hear of an easily embedded technology that allows a CO line card to pre-qualify a line for DSL capability without any other equipment, and another which uses both ends of the line to troubleshoot, identify, and locate line impairments, within a few meters, before the service truck ever leaves the garage.
One of my last stops was Optix Networks, a TranSwitch affiliated company that is heavily focused on 40-Gbit products. Their first chip, an 40-Gbit/s framer is taping out now, and is anticipated to sample in mid-Q3. Fabricated in 0.07 micron CMOS, the device will frame SONET or SDH, and support the FEC functions required for digital wrapper applications. An on-chip embedded mux will aggregate traffic from four OC-192 frame streams. This extremely ambitious chip will also contain an embedded Tensillica RISC engine for housekeeping and management.
After a few more meetings with Corrigent, Ikanos, Marvell, Silicon Labs, and Wintegra, I stumbled out of the halls and got ready for a meeting with RF-Solutions, an Atlanta-based wireless chip company that is one of the Yamacraw consortium's first success stories. We spent an evening in Altlanta's newly-fashionable (and rather upscale) district, discussing the state of wireless over the one leisurely meal of my trip. It looks like many of the supposed single-chip 802.11 transceivers are turning to external front ends to meet performance goals, and Wireless Solutions is providing a large percentage of them. This is helping supplement the revenues as their own dual-band WLAN transceiver and combo cellular/WLAN transceivers find traction in the marketplace.
The hour was late when I got back to my room at the Travelodge (my favorite under-$100/night hotel in downtown Atlanta), giving me only an hour to write before starting to pack and prepare for the early morning flight home. My legs were sore, my feet a basket case, but I was happy. Whether or not it's recovering as fast as we'd like, the telecom industry is showing definite signs of post-crash recovery.
Hopefully, next year's SuperComm will not make a liar out of me.
As always, your comments, questions, and tourism advice will all be welcomed
at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.