AppliedMicro ships 100G OTN transponder/muxponder chip

AppliedMicro says it has moved to general production availability of the TPO/TPOT404 transponder/muxponder and PQ60T 10/40G mapper/framer PHY, a combination AppliedMicro claims is the industry's first standard 100-Gbps transponder/muxponder offering for Optical Transport Network (OTN) and data centers.

The integrated framer/mapper PHY and SoftSilicon design has been developed by AppliedMicro’s TPACK subsdiary (see "AppliedMicro to acquire FPGA IP company TPACK to pursue OTN biz"). The SoftSilicon approach uses FPGAs (provided, at least at the time of the acquistion, by Altera) and TPACK IP to create a device that combines the flexibility and economics of FPGAs with the ease of use of ASSPs.

Having introduced the part one year ago (see "AppliedMicro unveils standard 100G OTN muxponder"), the company says its designs have now passed all interoperability tests and are reaching initial stages of deployment in 100G carrier and data center networks. Lars Pedersen, CTO of AppliedMicro TPACK, told Lightwave that the company has customers for the chipset, but declined to identify them or provide a total number.

AppliedMicro says the 100G device is capable of multiplexing any combination of 10G and 40G client signals into a 100G OTN signal (i.e., OTU4). Signals supported include 10G and 40G Ethernet and legacy OC-192/OC-768 SONET/SDH, as well as 8G and 10G Fibre Channel. As a result, the device can carry both data and storage traffic efficiently and can be used for file and backup synchronization between large data centers. It also interoperates with all major forward error correction (FEC) schemes in long-haul optical network architectures.

AppliedMicro has also created a common Application Programming Interface (API) for the TPO/TPOT404 and PQ60T to enable efficient integration and maintenance efforts for equipment vendors.

In addition, Pedersen said that some customers are using the TPO404 on a standalone basis for to support the transmission of 100 Gigabit Ethernet streams directly over OTU4 networks.

"Our recent survey of carriers shows that new deployments of 100G technology appear unstoppable. Operators will deploy higher speed wavelengths to achieve the lowest cost per bit for the transport of SONET/SDH, OTN, and Ethernet network traffic," said Andrew Schmitt, directing analyst, optical, for Infonetics Research. "Solutions like AppliedMicro's transponder/muxponder designs are well positioned for the rapid deployments of 100G OTN technology for long-haul applications."

Reference designs and API for the 100G transponder/muxponder offering are now available.

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