Atheros unveils 10G EPON SoC in wake of Opulan acquisition

Chip company Atheros Communications has announced a 10G Ethernet passive optical networking (EPON) system-on-chip (SoC) solution, an announcement coming a little more than six months after Atheros acquired PON chip specialist Opulan.

Atheros is now sampling the chip, its first foray into the FTTH PON market, to product vendor partners in the U.S., China and Japan. It comes in two versions: a 10 Gb/s optical line terminal solution for the service provider central office and a 10G optical network unit solution for customer premise equipment and cellular base stations. The SoCs support 10 B/s downstream and 1 Gb/s upstream bandwidth. Applications include advanced video services, like content sharing; MDU traffic aggregation, cable uplink and mobile backhaul.

The 10G EPON segment, a major jump from the 1 Gb/s solutions that just started showing up in service providers' networks in the last year or so, has long been seen as the next PON evolution and a new battleground for semiconductor firms, including those, like Wi-Fi innovator Atheros, that have made their names in other technology sectors. Broadcom also recently announced a 10G EPON chip, and several other vendors are at various stages with them. Atheros’ new SoCs comply with the new IEEE 802.3av standard, which among other things, supports backward compatibility with legacy 1 Gb/s EPON products.

The Atheros 10G EPON solution components include 10 Gb/s and 1 Gb/s EPON media access controllers, a MIPS24KEc® processor, configurable DDR2 and DDR3 controllers, a serializer/deserializer, and standard 10G Ethernet, SGMII and XAUI interfaces. Atheros also has leveraged the TR-156 standard to incorporate a proprietary packet processing/traffic management hardware engine. The SoCs also have internal processing power of its 10G EPON ONU supports multiple voice channels without an external digital signal processor, which Atheros says can significantly reduce the power consumption of residential and SMB gateways.

The 10G EPON announcement also comes just weeks after Qualcomm announced that it would acquire Atheros, whose PON efforts will market Qualcomm’s first significant push into wireline chips.