23 July 2002 -- West Bay Semiconductor Inc., Vancouver, BC, Canada, has announced that Groupe SAGEM SA has sponsored one of its next generation optical networking chips. SAGEM will deploy West Bay's chip in metro core and access equipment.
Groupe SAGEM, with consolidated sales of USD3bn in 2001, is an international technology group with presence in over 20 countries,
and the second largest provider of telecommunications equipment in France.
The chip, which targets next generation Synchronous Optical
Network/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SONET/SDH) and multi-service provisioning platform (MSPP) equipment, features deep channelisation, high-capacity switching and high-speed interface technologies, and enables simultaneous, real-time processing of thousands of voice and data streams.
West Bay estimates gross revenues will exceed USD10m from the sale of the new device to SAGEM, over five years. As part of the deal, West Bay also receives a Non Recurring Engineering (NRE) fee. Additional revenues are also expected from the sale of the new device to other equipment manufacturers.
"Transporting new data services over SONET/SDH is key for carriers as they seek to better exploit their existing network infrastructure," said Roy Rubenstein, senior analyst at telecoms analyst RHK Inc. "Framer ICs such as West Bay's are an important step in supporting Ethernet and storage area network data services over SONET/SDH in a bandwidth-efficient manner."
West Bay Semiconductor Inc. is a privately owned fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops and markets ultra high-density integrated circuits for optical communications network systems to metropolitan area network (MAN) and wide area network (WAN) equipment manufacturers.
The company's product portfolio includes the industry?s highest density channelised and virtual concatenation framers for OC-3/STM-1 to OC-48/STM-16 next generation and Ethernet over SONET/SDH (EoS) applications.