Infineon and Vitesse Announce Cooperative Effort for Interoperability of Industry-Leading SONET/SDH Framer and Time Slot Interchange ICs.

Business Editors

MUNICH, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 1, 2003

Infineon Technologies AG (NYSE: IFX)(FSE: IFX) and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: VTSS) today announced a collaboration to establish interoperability of currently available and future-generation SONET/SDH framer integrated circuits (ICs) and Time Slot Interchange ICs (TSIs).

By working together, Infineon and Vitesse provide system designers a complete end-to-end solution of critical silicon content for SONET/SDH systems that is unsurpassed in the industry. Interoperability between the Infineon framers and the Vitesse TSIs includes products from each company's SONET/SDH roadmap for 160 Gbps (gigabit-per-second), 320 Gbps and 640 Gbps SONET/SDH systems, as well as system-level reference designs that are useful for rapid development and deployment of next-generation systems.

The first result from this collaboration is the proven interoperability between the Infineon Tethys(TM) SONET/SDH Multi-Rate Framer IC and the Vitesse VSC9185 TSI. Achieving interoperability with the VSC9185 is important from an industry perspective because it is part of the Vitesse TSI product family that, according to industry analysts, has captured 30 percent of its market, making it one of the most widely used TSI product lines in the industry.

Interoperability Proven

Test results from the Tethys framer and VSC9185 TSI reference design and supporting software clearly demonstrate interoperability in terms of such key parameters as signal integrity, clock synchronization, frame alignment and automated, manual and hitless switching. Electrical compatibility and logical compatibility, including AC and DC coupling, optical connectivity and SONET framing at 2.5 Gbps, were shown to work error-free. In a test configuration using an FR4 backplane, a 0 BER (bit error rate) was achieved over a 15-hour operating period.

This reference design and all related software and documentation for operation are now available, and can be used by SONET/SDH telecommunications system operators and manufacturers to quickly upgrade circuit-handling capacity by integrating Tethys framer-based line cards into their existing hardware.

"This is an extremely important event," said Jeff Camillo, product marketing manager for the Infineon North America Communications Business Group, "because it means our customers can be assured of compatibility between our framers and one of the most widely used TSI product families in the industry, both now and in the future. We expect the relationship with Vitesse to be beneficial for everyone involved, but especially for the system OEM, who can now more easily achieve seamlessly integrated, high-density systems."

Incorporating the TFI-5 Specification

The companies are now focused on interfacing their TFI-5-compliant devices, such as Vitesse's VSC9195, the industry's first 340 Gbps, 136-channel, non-blocking TSI and the Tethys Multi-Rate Framer. Use of a TFI-5 interface ensures a seamlessly integrated solution for next-generation SONET/SDH system deployments, resolving such system issues as automatic protection switching (APS) and performance monitoring. Used in conjunction with bit-slicing functionality, this solution provides more efficient scaling to high-density switch matrices in a lower power, denser form factor than a traditional three-stage architecture.

"Infineon's collaboration with Vitesse illustrates that the major players in the SONET/SDH market are committed to supporting their customers with complete, interoperable solutions rather than just point products," said Andy Ebert, product marketing manager for Vitesse. "Combining our experience and mastery of signal integrity and SONET/SDH system issues, customers gain a significant reduction in both development costs and time-to-market."

Infineon Tethys SONET/SDH Multi-Rate Framer

The Tethys SONET/SDH Multi-Rate Framer family of ICs provides, in one chip, functions that are critical for next-generation SONET/SDH networking equipment in such applications as add/drop multiplexers (ADMs) and digital cross-connect switches. The functions include aggregation of up to 16 channels of traffic, pointer processing, serializing/deserializing, clock and data recovery, and transport overhead (TOH) and path overhead (POH) processing. The Tethys framers provide unsurpassed flexibility by allowing every port to be independently set for a different data rate, permitting "any port, any rate" configuration, and by providing a direct interface to optical modules. The Tethys 448 fully supports 16 channels of OC/STS-3/STM-1, 16 channels of OC/STS-12/STM-4, or 16 channels of OC/STS-48/STM-16, which can be mixed in any required combination. In addition to the Tethys 448 capabilities, the Tethys 4192 can support four channels of OC/STS-192/STM-64.

Vitesse TSI Product Family

As the leading commercial supplier of TSIs, Vitesse has built a family of devices using a mature feature set and several key architectural principles that create a chip solution that is flexible, powerful and simple to use. Vitesse's TSIs are ideal for switching applications in Metro and Access applications. The flagship devices of the product family are the VSC9185 and the VSC9195. The VSC9185, a 64 x 64 TSI supporting STS-12/STM-4 or STS-48/STM-16 on every input and output independently, provides 160 Gbps of non-blocking STS-1 connectivity (3072 x 3072 STS-1) with support for concatenated tributaries. All inputs and outputs are differential serial signals running at 2.488 Gbps or 622 Mbps for flexible switch card and system backplane design. The VSC9195 is the industry's first 340 Gbps TSI with TFI-5 compliance. It is a 136 x 136 device supporting STS-48/STM-16 and non-blocking STS-1 connectivity (6528 x 6528 STS-1).

About Vitesse

Vitesse is a leading designer and manufacturer of innovative silicon solutions and optical devices used in the networking, communications and storage industries worldwide. Vitesse works to specifically address the requirements of system designers and OEMs by providing high-performance, integrated products that are ideally suited for use in Enterprise, Access, Metro and Core applications. Additional company and product information is available at www.vitesse.com.

About Infineon

Infineon Technologies AG, Munich, Germany, offers semiconductor and system solutions for the automotive and industrial sectors, for applications in the wired communications markets, secure mobile solutions as well as memory products. With a global presence, Infineon operates in the US from San Jose, CA, in the Asia-Pacific region from Singapore and in Japan from Tokyo. In the fiscal year 2002 (ending September 2002), the company achieved sales of Euro 5.21 billion with about 30,400 employees worldwide. Infineon is listed on the DAX index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: IFX). Further information is available at www.infineon.com.