Broadcom Corporation, the leading provider of integrated circuits enabling broadband communications, announced the Broadcom BCM8501, a single-chip OC-192 Packet over SONET/Asynchronous Transfer Mode (POS/ATM) framer and mapper with a power dissipation of only 2.7 watts, which is 60% lower than today's competitive solutions. This low-power chip eliminates heat sinks, fans and extra power supplies, resulting in higher density OC-192 (9.953 Gigabit per second/Gbps) line cards for wide area network (WAN) gigabit/terabit routers and high-end aggregation routers. High density optical line cards enable service providers to handle more bandwidth in a smaller physical space, allowing them to better accommodate today's phenomenal growth in Internet traffic.

The BCM8501 broadens Broadcom's optical transport product offering, enabling the company to provide complete silicon solutions for OC-192 line cards in WAN equipment. More specifically, this framer/mapper device can be coupled with Broadcom's low-power CMOS OC-192 single-chip transceiver, the X-PHY BCM8150 also announced, to develop very high-density line cards with a power dissipation of only 4 Watts - a fraction, or 30%, of today's most competitive solutions.

Broadcom is the only company offering a complete line of SONET physical layer silicon solutions produced entirely using CMOS technology. This uniform technology base allows the company to rapidly develop the next generation of highly integrated, low power optical transport silicon solutions. Broadcom's early development partners are already envisioning faster, denser and more integrated systems enabled by this higher level of silicon integration. Broadcom's optical transport IP cores, such as the OC-192 POS Mapper/Framer or FEC cores, when combined with its OC-192 CMOS transceivers, provide the highest port density system-on-chip solutions to optical equipment manufacturers.

Solutions such as this, in CMOS, will continue to put enormous pressure on the GaAs manufacturers. They will respond with new processes and additional features but the focus must now be towards simplifying their processes to maintain the same margins. Broadcom has moved full tilt into this market and I don't think that even two years ago we would have expected pure CMOS to be handling 10 Gbit/s. This part is in a 0.18-micron process.

The technology in these new OC-192 parts came from Broadcom's acquisition last year of NewPort Communications. This part supports framing, scrambling, descrambling, parity processing, alarm signal addition and detection, as well as full section and line overhead processing. The product can interface to Broadcom's BCM8150 OC-192 transceiver through full-duplex, 16-bit 622-MHz parallel interface LVDS.