PMC-Sierra's GPON ONT reference design achieves line-rate processing at all packet sizes
MARCH 30, 2007 -- PMC-Sierra Inc. (search for PMC-Sierra) has announced the availability of the PAS65311 GPON ONT (optical network terminal) Reference Design. The design features PMC-Sierra's GigaPASS architecture and includes a fully featured ITU-T G.984 GPON MAC, an advanced classification engine, robust QoS queuing, advanced VLAN bridging and manipulation, and IPTV filtering, all performing at line-rate speeds for all packet sizes. The solution has already proven interoperability with most existing GPON OLT designs, the company reports.
"We welcome PMC-Sierra's entry into the GPON market after such great success in EPON," says Michael Shores, chief executive of TXP Corp., a supplier of ONT products (following TXP's acquisition of Siemens' ONT business in 2006). "We found PMC-Sierra's solution to be the only one to achieve true line-rate processing at all packet sizes, a critical factor for our customers deploying true triple-play services."
PMC-Sierra believes that as speeds surpass gigabit-per-second rates, an entirely new design approach is required in access network equipment, compared with sub-gigabit-per-second technologies such as DSL, cable, and BPON. The GigaPASS architecture integrates multiple hardware-based packet-processing engine subsystems to deliver wire-speed packet processing at all packet sizes, and combines them with a control processor supporting Linux and VxWorks operating systems and extensible middleware platforms.
The reference design features the PAS6201-G0 PON ONT system-on-a-chip (SoC) with GigaPASS FTTH architecture. The PAS6201-G0 is the GPON version of PMC-Sierra's PAS6201 EPON SoC, which has already been deployed in the millions, claims the company. It is coupled with PAS6211 GPON Framer/SerDes to provide a low-cost, high-performance GPON ONT offering. The design includes schematics, bill of materials, firmware, full OMCI stack, TR-69 and VoIP SIP software stacks running on top of Linux operating system, and full documentation, reducing the time required for an OEM to develop and deploy ONTs.
The PAS65311 ONT Reference Design package and the PAS6201-G0 PON SoC are available now, and are already sampling to GPON equipment manufacturers. The PAS6211 GPON Framer/SerDes will be sampling to PMC-Sierra's customers next month.
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