Vitesse announces expansion strategy for switch fabric product line
Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ:VTS S) unveiled an expanded switch fabric strategy to deliver a family of scalable packet fabrics for Core, Access, Optical, and Enterprise networking markets. Designed to provide a solution across multiple system markets, Vitesse's switch fabrics offer performance and a low risk methodology for new system development. Vitesse also announced the first implementation of this strategy, with the introduction of the CrossStream E chipset.
Furthering the company's expanded strategy focuses on providing a broad range of switch fabric products based upon industry-standard interfaces and advanced QoS capabilities. As this strategy unfolds over the next several quarters, the company will leverage its experience in high performance interconnect ICs with efficient CMOS technology, to become a top provider of scalable fabrics across a wide range of platforms.
"With the introduction of products under the Vitesse switch fabric strategy, our customers will have the opportunity to select from several scalable solutions that deliver significant performance and integration advantages for Gigabit Ethernet, 10GbE, OC-48, and OC-192 based platforms," said Gary Lee,
vice president for switch fabric development.
The Vitesse Intelligent Switch Fabric products achieves integration, incorporating all fabric functionality including queuing, scheduling, and switching, as well as serial backplane transceivers into two components. These devices utilize cost-effective CMOS technology and enable high availability in network systems with dedicated redundant serial links. Each Vitesse fabric is highly scalable through the addition of multiple switch devices, addressing a wide range of system capacities while maintaining full non-blocking performance for both unicast and multicast traffic. Interoperability between fabric products is eased via industry standard interfaces, such as CSIX, and common serial link signaling, significantly reducing implementation and time-to-market risks for end users. Vitesse switch fabrics are supported with a broad range of applications notes, example board layout designs, and Vitesse's applications engineering staff, all of which are critical for first pass success with multi-gigabit rate serial backplanes.
As the first step in the implementation of this strategy, Vitesse also announced the introduction of the CrossStream E chipset, a packet-and cell-based intelligent switch fabric for Access markets. Cross-Stream E provides a transition for current CrossStream switch fabric customers to cost- and power-effective CMOS. Leveraging the same 2.125Gb/s serial backplane technology present in CrossStream, existing customers can easily upgrade their systems with the latest devices and achieve a four-fold reduction in power consumption while improving upon backplane signal integrity. CrossStream E supports up to 16 OC-18 ports and 64Gb/s of switching capacity in a fully redundant configuration.
The CrossStream E chipset is sampling now. The VSC870 transceiver is offered in a 192 BGA package and is priced at $79 in 1K quantities. The VSC882 intelligent switch is offered in a 304 BGA package and is priced at $145 in 1K quantities.
About Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation:
Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation is a designer and supplier of innovative, high performance semiconductors utilizing processes for the manufacture of next generation DWDM and optical networking communications equipment.