Agere pushes chips for lower network costs

New processors made by Agere Systems for telecommunications services platforms pack a variety of functions and high performance into a small space, potentially paving the way for carrier gear with lower prices, power and cooling requirements and space costs, the company said Thursday.

Agere unveiled six processors, some designed for use in wired multiservice switches and some for 3G (third-generation) wireless base stations, and will demonstrate them at the Supercomm conference in Atlanta next month. By integrating many functions in one chip, Agere hopes to help the system vendors make such products smaller and less expensive.

Integrating the functions of many chips into one can not only cut the cost of making a device, but also reduce the ongoing cost to a carrier of using the box in its network, according to John Rolfe, manager of broadband access marketing at Agere, in Allentown, Pa. A smaller device takes up less precious space in a carrier facility, consumes less power and requires less cooling because it creates less heat, Rolfe said.

One new Agere chip, the APP550TM (Advanced Payload Plus 550 Traffic Manager), can perform functions for ATM, Ethernet, frame relay and other services at 5G bit/sec. Among the features included in the chip are 256,000 traffic-shaping engines, each of which can control a different traffic flow. That could represent one service for each of 256,000 carrier customers, each service having its own requirements for quality of service, Rolfe said. The APP530TM, also announced Thursday, is similar but built for just 2.5G bit/sec of throughput.

Agere expects the APP processors to be used in platforms that connect to an ATM network on the back end and can be used to provide a variety of services to customers on the other end. In addition to an Ethernet or Frame Relay data service for an enterprise, those services could include leased lines, DSL, Point-to-Point Protocol and Multiprotocol Label Switching. Typical applications for such a platform would include frame relay aggregation and Ethernet over SONET, an emerging data service that leverages the kind of backbone most carriers already use.

Because of the flexibility of the platforms that vendors can build with the processors, carriers can keep the hardware in the network for a longer time before replacing it, further reducing their costs, which could help them cut rates, he added.

Also Thursday, Agere unveiled its TAAD Lite and TAAD UltraLite processors, designed for small 3G base stations that provide coverage in a limited area or within a building. Each of the processors integrates 12 chips into one, allowing base-station makers to reduce the size of "microcells" and "picocells," Rolfe said. The TAAD (Telecom ATM Access Device) processors also can boost the capacity of these types of cells, which typically have supported just 250 simultaneous calls because of the limitations of ATM SAR (segmentation and reassembly) hardware. The TAAD Lite boosts that to 1,000 calls and the TAAD UltraLite to 500.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.