AMCC merges 10GbE, Sonet in new offering

Applied Micro Circuits Corp. is leveraging two decades of experience in Sonet and Ethernet to develop a new product line that will bring 10Gbit Sonet framing to 10Gbit metro Ethernet.

The first device in the new Metron family, Pemaquid, begins sampling this month. Metron eventually will include a range of devices for metro and carrier Ethernet.

"The heart of future public networks is Ethernet, yet developers need all the mapping and framing functions for the OTN," or Optical Transport Network, said Gilles Garcia, who oversees marketing for all AMCC telecom products. "This allows us to use the MACs and network processors from existing Ethernet networks."

The device can function as a "super-PHY" for Fibre Channel, as well as for Sonet and Ethernet platforms. It offers seven different 10GbE mapping modes, bit transparency, 10G OTU-2 via GFP and LAN pass-through. Garcia said that while AMCC sees a variety of companies with generic framing procedure modes, the company believes it has no competition in offering LAN pass-through with GFP.

A backplane interface known as XAUI is integrated on the chip to link to high-speed serial backplanes. The chip includes a full clock management unit that can generate all line rates. A 16bit, 66MHz interface links to control-plane processors. AMCC designers combined the mapper and forward error correction blocks from the company's Rubicon product family with PHY functions from the QT PHY family, which AMCC acquired as part of its Quake Technologies acquisition.

Garcia said AMCC already is working on a variety of potential 100GbE implementations. PHY support likely will begin with a half-duplex device, he said.

- Loring Wirbel
EE Times