networkZONE Products for the week of August 19, 2002
West Bay Says . . .
West Bay Semi's 48-Channel Multi-Protocol VC Framer
Runs GFP and LAPS At OC-12, OC-4
Product Review Update - West Bay WB4500 Multi-Protocol
Framer
Editor's Note: My primary job at analogZONE is to
deliver information and analysis to my readers that is as accurate as possible.
Unfortunately, when I first reviewed the WB4500 back in June of this year, I made a couple
of factual errors which I'm correcting here. The mistake involves a misunderstanding
of the unique capabilities of West Bay's framer to aggregate many channels
and many data types into up to 48 virtual channels for transport over an
OC-48 connection. Please refer to the italicized paragraphs towards the
end of my review to see the corrections I've made. I extend my apologies
to West Bay and my readers, and everyone for their patience.
West Bay Semiconductor's WB4500 is the industry's highest density fully
channelized multi-protocol OC-48/STM-16 and OC-12/STM-4 virtual concatenation
data framer. The device targets next generation synchronous optical network
and synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) network systems.
The WB4500 represents a breakthrough in data mapping and transport. Through 48 separate logical channels, the device offers simultaneous, multi-protocol processing and mapping for TDM (voice and leased lines) and key data transmission protocols including ATM, POS, GFP and LAPS. This allows equipment manufacturers to develop single box solutions targeting multiple geographic markets and applications.
Key applications for the WB4500 include Ethernet over SONET/SDH systems, multi-service provisioning platforms (MSPPs), routers, switches, access concentrators, add/drop multiplexers and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems.
"The WB4500 gives our customers a unique and important ability to develop multi-market multi-application next generation SONET/SDH systems," says Tino Varelas, President and CEO of West Bay Semiconductor. "The WB4500 is being designed into several platforms today, and we're in advanced discussions with multiple additional customers, signaling strong potential for this device."
The WB4500 is designed for use in high density channelized SONET and SDH telecom and data communications applications in the metropolitan area network (MAN) as well as at the edge of the wide area network (WAN).
"The WB4500 takes integration and channelization in standard components to a new level," added Mr. Varelas. "It raises customer expectations further, and reinforces West Bay's position as a key competitor in the high density channelized SONET/SDH chip market segment."
Gartner Dataquest Vice President and Chief Analyst of semiconductor research, Jeremy Donovan commented, "Component vendors who enable equipment manufacturers to build SONET/SDH boxes with virtual concatenation, that consolidate protocols and eliminate geographic boundaries should be well positioned to benefit over the next several years."
The WB4500 is West Bay's third channelized framer product announced over the past twelve months. It can be used seamlessly with the company's existing framer solutions, offering OEMs the highest density family of products for OC-3/STM-1 to OC-48/STM-16 channelized applications. The device is based on West Bay's unique, proprietary architecture that enables high-density chips using fewer transistors per port, which allows for more functionality onto a smaller die than competitive products.
The unique feature set of the WB4500 includes:
The WB4500 offers other features including a 4 x 622 Mbit/sec redundant serial telecom bus interface enabling the device to be connected to redundant switch fabrics. The device also features the SPI-3/UL-3 32 bit x 104 MHz cell/packet systems interface. An additional interface is the redundant 4 x 622 Mbit/sec serial add/drop bus interface, which allows the user to connect to external PDH mappers or to proprietary mapping devices.
Additionally, the WB4500 includes the SONET/SDH framing, full overhead processing, alarm detection, performance monitoring, line and path bit error rate monitoring (BERM) and complete STS-1/VC-3 timeslot interchange that supports traffic grooming and automatic protection switching. It also incorporates West Bay's proprietary automatic online error recognition technology (ALERT), an on-line fault detection feature that ensures user traffic integrity in the entire datapath.
WB4500 is implemented in a standard 0.14 micron CMOS process, and operates
across the industrial temperature range of -40 degrees Celsius to 85 degrees
Celsius.
analogZONE Says . . .
I reviewed West Bay's 16 x OC-3 framer last summer and found it to be a very well-conceived, if slightly ambitious part. Even then, they were convinced that deep channelization would be the key to making SONET relevant in the coming decade, and that it would be one of their key differentiators in a market crowded with highly competent competitors such as Agere, Agilent, and TranSwitch. With this new WB4500 OC-48 framer, they have added a level of flexibility and a couple of new features that will keep their competitors on their toes.
With a focus on metro core and metro access, West Bay has carved out what it believes to be a global solution for OC-48 and OC-12, with accommodation to every concatenation protocol currently approved by a standards body, and then some. Like most of its competitors, the WB4500 handles both the SONET and SDH framing format. Data traffic is mapped into VC-3 chunks (51 Mbits/s), and then is aggregated into a TUG-3 container. The chip's GFP capability supports EoS for North American SONET, while LAPS helps put packets over SDH frames in Europe and Asia.
The WB4500 starts to differentiate itself from the pack because it is really flexible. Many of the new Ethernet-capable framers are really focused on mapping Ehternet onto SONET/SDH, and give other formats less attention. Not so here. The framer's versatility begins with it SPI-3 LAN-side interface that can accept Gig Ethernet or other traffic including UTOPIA, FICON, ESCON, or FibreChannel with the attachment of an inexpensive external PHY device. The framer's integrated serial TDM telecom bus interface replaces costly external chips, and may be a unique feature that will endear it to anybody trying to support voice or perform multi-service switching.
As far as protocols, the WB4500 supports LAPS, GFP, ATM, PoS, and plain old TDM traffic. You can mix and match protocols on a per STS-1 basis. Of course, Agilent's excellent framer does most of this while supporting GFP and LAPS, traffic, but it does not "speak" ATM. This capability might be important for aggregation of ADSL traffic which often uses ATM as its transport layer, and for interfacing to legacy core systems which are often based on ATM.
Another really somewhat unique feature of the WB4500 is its quad OC-12 mode, that allows you to treat 4-622 Mbit/s SONET/SDH channels as a single channel or push packets across four independent channels. One of the few others capable of this is TranSwitch's new EtherMap-48 framer. In this OC-12 mode, the WB4500 can make use of its own on-chip CDR circuitry and SERDES circuitry, but must rely on an external CDR for OC-48 operation. Since I was comparing the West Bay to the Agilent part earlier, I should point out that Agilent does have full OC-48 CDR and SERDES capability on-chip.
West Bay makes a big deal of its ability to slice and dice an OC-48 stream into up to 48 virtual channels, while some of its cohorts cannot. I think that this was much more of an issue for earlier EoS products, and is quickly being addressed by most companies, including Agilent whose current framer can only create 46 channels. Although I think this won't be an issue in most applications, I imagine they'll take care of this on the next rev of their product line.
NOTE: The previous paragraph was incorrect - I did not understand some of the newer SONET terminology and mistook the granularity a framer can support for the number of virtual channels it can process. After getting some clarification, it turns out that both the Agilent and West Bay framers can handle traffic with granularity up to 48 STS-1 channels, but only the WB4500 can combine the STS-1 channels into a PoS interface that allows you to connect up to 48 Ethernet, FibreChannel, ESCON, or other interfaces. This means extra chips, but it allows you to mix-and-match any combination of STS-1s channels into any one of up to 48 virtual channels.
It is slightly unfair to compare the Agilent or other parts as they are intended for different applications, but just as a reference, Agilent's latest VC framer supports four virtual channels via its quad on-chip Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. For the record the latest chip from Cypress supports 16, and PMC's offering supports only two EoS-only VCs.
What's more, the WB4500 can simultaneously process multiple data types mixed traffic, containing ATM, GFP, LAPS (The Asian equivalent of GFP), Ethernet, or TDM (most important in legacy SONET applications). If you're building the next generation of multi-service equipment, the flexibility and efficiency that West Bay offers you should save you the trouble of creating the intelligence to handle deeply concatenated, multi-format traffic somewhere else in your system.
Nevertheless, an abundance of features and a well-thought out architecture makes the WB4500 one of the leaders in this market - assuming they make their Q3 '02 target for sampling.
I still have not received many details about how West Bay manages to achieve its highly-touted reduced transistor counts and resultant power savings, but given the fact that they have delivered working silicon, and they are being realistic about their CDR capabilities, I'll drop their Vapor Index Rating from 2.5 to 2.0 saltshakers.
The WB4500 is in a 31 mm x 31 mm, FCBGA-841 priced
at USD $450 in volume quantities.
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