New Conexant 12.5 Gbps Interconnect Eliminates Internal System Bottlenecks for High-Speed Internet Equipment.

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 2000

New Quad Backplane and Chassis-To-Chassis Transceiver is

First to Scale Easily to 50 Gbps Data Rates, Allowing Today's

Switches and Routers to Move Data Quickly Inside the Box as

Incoming Data Rates Increase

Conexant Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:CNXT) Monday introduced a 12.5 Gbps, four-channel serial transceiver that enables the efficient and cost-effective development of new high-speed switches and routers with internal data rates matching the ever-increasing speed of incoming data.

The Quad SkyRail(TM) transceiver is Conexant's first device for the system backplane and chassis-to-chassis interconnect market since its acquisition of HotRail in June.

The new scalable, highly integrated transceiver directly addresses the needs of network system makers who must design systems that can maintain internal wire-speed traffic without congestion for today's OC-48 (2.4 Gbps), OC-192 (10 Gbps) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, as well as tomorrow's OC-768 (40 Gbps) and 40 Gigabit Ethernet networking equipment.

Backplane high-speed serial transceivers have become increasingly important for resolving the bandwidth bottleneck created when incoming data traveling over optical fiber hits a system's backplane and then must be routed through a variety of chips and boards inside the box.

The industry has rapidly increased "first mile" infrastructure performance and now equipment designers must optimize intra-node chip-to-chip and board-to-board processing in order to avoid congestion and maintain wire-speed traffic inside the network system and through the backplane.

Conexant's backplane interconnect solutions are designed to eliminate these packet processing and control plane limitations that prevent the Internet from scaling into a high-reliability converged services system.

"This is an important addition to Conexant's broad networking product portfolio of end-to-end networking solutions, which encompasses optical and electrical transceivers, physical layer devices, framers, network processors, switch fabrics and other backplane interconnect transceivers.

"It is yet another leadership product from Conexant and is the first fruit of our strategic acquisition of HotRail," said Bill Giudice, vice president and general manager of Conexant's Broadband Internetworking Systems business unit. "The high-speed interconnect technology used in the Quad SkyRail paves the way for Conexant to deliver complete 10 Gbps 802.3ae Ethernet solutions as soon as the standard is finalized."

The Quad SkyRail is a power-efficient, low-cost chip manufactured with the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process that enables today's switches, routers and other network equipment to quickly and easily move data from line card to line card, blade to blade and across a backplane, coaxial cable or fiber.

The Quad SkyRail is the industry's first single-chip solution to easily scale up to 12.5 Gbps data rates, or up to 50 Gbps with four concatenated devices, without requiring additional synchronization circuitry.

"The Quad SkyRail transceiver complements previously announced HotRail transceiver products as we continue to create a growing family of solutions that address critical system bottlenecks caused by the industry's exponential increase in Internet and other network traffic," said Elie Massabki, director of marketing for the high-speed interconnect product line within Conexant's Broadband Internetworking Systems business unit.

"The SkyRail family of devices makes Conexant a key provider of leading-edge backplane transceivers for today's and tomorrow's networks."

The Quad SkyRail reduces the need to migrate to expensive optical backplanes and printed circuit board material in order to increase the bandwidth between line cards and blades, significantly enhancing the development of more efficient networking gear. The Quad SkyRail device achieves 12.5 Gbps data rates at 3.125 Gbps per differential pair -- while four concatenated devices deliver up to 50 Gbps -- using standard FR-4 printed circuit board material.

The level of integration and performance capability of the Quad SkyRail will keep the cost of Internet infrastructure equipment low even though the bandwidth requirement is increasing dramatically.

With the addition of the Quad SkyRail (CX27204) serializer/ deserializer (SERDES) transceiver, Conexant now has a family of four backplane interconnect solutions. In May, the company introduced the 16 Gbps HotRail HRP2100 parallel transceiver (CX27250), the fastest, lowest latency, lowest power per gigabit per second CMOS transceiver in the industry.

At the same time, it introduced the SkyRail SRP3100 (CX27200) SERDES serial transceiver, which supports up to 3.125 Gbps data rate interconnect applications.

Today, Conexant introduced SkyRail-E CX27201, a superset of the CX27200 that integrates optional 8B/10B encoding and 10B/8B decoding functionality and a flexible-parallel interface that can accommodate incoming data at single and double data rates (see today's product alert introducing the SkyRail CX27201 3.125 Gbps full duplex SERDES transceiver).

Technical Details

Conexant's CX27204 Quad SkyRail is the first quad 3.125 SERDES transceiver to integrate the transmitters, receivers, serializers/ deserializers, clock data recovery (CDR), 8B/10B encoding, 10B/8B decoding, termination resistors, word alignment logic, FIFO buffers, channel-to-channel and chip-to-chip synchronization circuitry all in one device.

The CX27204 is a highly integrated IC containing four transceivers that can operate from 1 Gbps to 3.125 Gbps per channel. Each transceiver can be operated independently with separate clock inputs and recovered clocks. Alternatively, all four transceivers can function with a single clock input and all high-speed inputs can be de-skewed and aligned using internal alignment circuitry and FIFO buffers.

Further, multiple CX27204 devices can be daisy-chained to align channels on multiple devices to provide up to 50 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth without the need for additional external components. The CX27204 can also be configured to operate as a dual transceiver with redundant drivers and receivers, making it ideal for telecommunications applications that require 1:1 redundancy and fault tolerance on the link.

The CX27204 transceiver electrical interface supports Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet standards and is interoperable with InfiniBand and Serial ATA compliant devices. It contains comma detect circuitry and optional 8B/10B encoding/decoding logic. Its low-power architecture reduces total power consumption to less than 2 watts for all four channels, as compared with 1.5 watts per channel for alternative solutions.

It also contains on-chip termination resistors and programmable output swing, enabling it to be used for board-to-board and chassis-to-chassis applications without the need for external components.

Manufactured in a 0.25-micron CMOS process, the CX27204 device is packaged in a 256-pin heat slug ball grid array (HSBGA) and operates with a 2.5V core power supply and 3.3V TTL I/O.

Pricing and Availability

The CX27204 Quad SkyRail transceiver will sample in October, and volume production is scheduled for December. It is priced at $79 in quantities of 10,000.

About Conexant Systems Inc.

With revenues of approximately $2 billion per year, Conexant is the world's largest independent company focused exclusively on providing semiconductor solutions for communications electronics. With more than 30 years of experience in developing communications technology, the company draws upon its expertise in mixed-signal processing to deliver integrated systems and semiconductor products for a broad range of communications applications.

These products facilitate communications worldwide through wireline voice and data communications networks, cordless and cellular wireless telephony systems, personal imaging devices and equipment, and emerging cable and wireless broadband communications networks.

The company aligns its business into five product platforms: Network Access, Wireless Communications, Digital Infotainment, Personal Imaging and Personal Computing. Conexant is a member of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 Indices. For more information, visit Conexant at www.conexant.com.

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