Rockwell's Network Access Division Upgrades ATM SAR Controller Chip, Reports Success of Traffic- Management Architecture.SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 16, 1997-- Customers praise per-connection scheduler architecture pioneered by Rockwell's earlier Brooktree Division communications business unit, which has been merged into the newly formed Network Access Division. Most recent upgrade paves the way for tough new traffic-management standards. The Network Access Division of Rockwell Semiconductor Systems today announced that it has begun shipping the most recent upgrade to its first-generation ATM Segmentation and Reassembly segmentation and reassembly - segmentation (SAR (Segmentation And Reassembly) The protocol that converts data to cells for transmission over an ATM network. It is the lower part of the ATM Adaption Layer (AAL), which is responsible for the entire operation. See AAL. SAR - segmentation and reassembly ) controller chip. The Bt8230EPFC EPFC Enseignement de Promotion et de Formation Continue (Ulb, Brussels) EPFC Elvis Presley Fan Club is the first product to be released from the newly formed division, which was announced today and combines Rockwell's previous Brooktree Division communications unit with the company's central-site modem chip business. Like its predecessors, the Bt8230EPFC SAR controller chip features a unique per-connection traffic-management scheduling mechanism that has now seen a year of proven success and will be the cornerstone for Rockwell's pin-compatible second-generation device, due by mid-year. The company has added incremental improvements to the Bt8230EPFC, including tripling the size of its internal FIFO (First In First Out) A storage method that retrieves the item stored for the longest time. Contrast with LIFO. See traffic engineering methods. FIFO - first-in first-out buffers to accommodate systems that can't fully comply with ATM host latency specifications. The Bt8230EPFC also has been re-qualified as an industrial temperature-range device. The Bt8230EPFC can be used to generate a complete, highly integrated and economical 155 Mbps PCI (1) (Payment Card Industry) See PCI DSS. (2) (Peripheral Component Interconnect) The most widely used I/O bus (peripheral bus). ATM adapter solution, and supports all of the requirements specified in the ATM Forum User Network Interface (UNI) 3.1 and related ANSI (American National Standards Institute, New York, www.ansi.org) A membership organization founded in 1918 that coordinates the development of U.S. voluntary national standards in both the private and public sectors. It is the U.S. member body to ISO and IEC. and International Telecommunications Union See ITU. (body, standard) International Telecommunications Union - (ITU) ITU-T, the telecommunication standardisation sector of ITU, is responsible for making technical recommendations about telephone and data (including fax) communications systems for PTTs and suppliers. (ITU (International Telecommunication Union, Geneva, Switzerland, www.itu.ch) A telecommunications standards body that is under the auspices of the United Nations. Comprising more than 185 member countries, the ITU sets standards for global telecom networks. ) standards. More than 25 customers have now selected the Bt8230 platform for use in routers, hubs, WAN service access mixes and platforms, and switch control modules. Rockwell sees a continued and expanding market for the Bt8230EPFC in such increasingly important ATM "edge" market applications as transparent LAN service A service from a carrier that links remote Ethernets together. It is called "transparent" because the connected Ethernets are viewed as one Ethernet by the customer, regardless of the technology employed by the carrier in between. , frame relay over ATM, and network control and management. These applications are growing in popularity as ATM continues to build momentum in the WAN. "The Bt8230EPFC is a solid solution for today's ATM applications and proves the validity of core traffic-management scheduler technology that we believe will be critical for implementing the new Available Bit Rate specifications that were finalized late last year," said Warner Andrews, strategic product line manager for Rockwell's Network Access Division. "Our goal has been to establish an ATM SAR controller platform that is robust enough to support both current and future traffic-management specifications, while being flexible enough to ease what many believe will be a tough ATM market migration path to new standards and products." Customers have praised the Bt8230 platform for its unique scheduler technology and for its planned migration path to products supporting the industry's new Traffic Management 4.0 (TM 4.0) Available Bit Rate (ABR (1) (AutoBaud Rate detect) The analysis of the first characters of a message to determine its transmission speed and number of start and stop bits. (2) (Available Bit R ) service specifications. Unlike competitive solutions that handle complex traffic-management functions either in software or via a separate chip, the Bt8230EPFC uses a unique, programmable on-chip scheduler that has been proven to increase system performance by as much as 50 percent. It also enables system-level service guarantees even in networks with thousands of simultaneously open connections. To support the more demanding TM 4.0 ABR traffic-management standards, the company will enhance this core scheduler technology in a second-generation ATM SAR controller chip family. The first member of this family will be launched later this quarter and will be pin- and software-compatible with the Bt8230 family. "Rockwell's Network Access Division -- and the Brooktree Division before it -- has been an excellent partner and has worked with us to understand the needs of our customers," said Doug Green, Product Marketing Manager of NetEdge Systems. "The company's migration strategy allows us to implement features and functionality in our multiservice access concentrators that our service provider customers need to be competitive and successful." Scheduler Technology is Key to Both Current and Future ATM Solutions The Bt8230EPFC is unique in allowing each connection to operate at an independent bit rate of up to 155 Mbit/s per channel. On-chip logic calculates and maintains individual rate parameters for each connection, enabling the Bt8230EPFC to individually manage connections, perform dynamic rate allocation and implement new performance-monitoring specifications. Also included is on-chip logic for all necessary statistics-gathering for the more stringent ATM network management function. The Bt8230EPFC chip's core scheduler technology will be particularly important in next-generation products that support the new TM 4.0 ABR service. This service, which dynamically allocates bandwidth between active connections to optimize performance network-wide, requires that the SAR controller perform all traffic-management, performance-monitoring and general AAL (ATM Adaption Layer) The part of the ATM protocol that breaks up application packets into 48-byte payloads which become ATM cells when the 5-byte headers are attached. The AAL resides between the higher layer transport protocols and the ATM layer. processing duties at 155 Mbps on a high numbers of active channels, all within a single cell time or roughly 2700ns. To support these requirements, the company will leverage its core scheduler technology and combine user-configurable scheduling with the dedicated logic necessary for best-of-class per-connection TM 4.0 scheduling. This will enable performance and flexibility that are not possible with RISC-based schedulers, host-controlled schedulers or simple hard-coded schedulers. The Bt8230EPFC can perform all AAL0, AAL3/4 and AAL5 SAR functions while supporting 16,000 active Virtual Circuit Channels (VCCs). The device includes a PCI host interface (master or slave mode), and allows ATM cell transfers directly into the main system CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. without local buffering to uniquely balance the strengths of the PCI bus with the need to achieve sustained 155.52 Mbps ATM speeds. This results in lower-cost ATM adapters since customers don't require expensive dual port memory or local packet memory. Other features of the Bt8230EPFC include support for interleaved AAL5, AAL3/4, and Segmentation and Reassembly Control (SRC (SouRCe) Contrast with DST, which is an abbreviation of "destination." ) processing, which allows simultaneous support of ATM and Switched Multi-Megabit Data Services (SMDS (Switched Multimegabit Data Service) A high-speed, switched data communications service offered by the local telephone companies for interconnecting LANs in different locations. It was introduced in 1992 and became generally available nationwide by 1995. ). The Bt8230EPFC offers the option of a local processor, and also supports processor-less architectures for applications like ATM network interfaces for file servers, routers/hubs, Digital Service Units (DSUs), WAN Data Terminal Equipment (DTE (Data Terminating Equipment) A communications device that is the source or destination of signals on a network. It is typically a terminal or computer. Contrast with DCE.  DTE - Data Terminal Equipment ) and cost-effective PCI ATM cards. Designers may opt for speed-selectable SRAM See static RAM. SRAM - static random-access memory to further facilitate price/performance tradeoffs. A choice of UTOPIA master, UTOPIA slave or Bt8222-compatible ATM PHY See physical layer and physical. interface is available, and the UTOPIA slave model allows the Bt8230 to be clocked by a switch fabric, which may be attractive to hub designers. The Bt8230EPFC is a single CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) Pronounced "c-moss." The most widely used integrated circuit design. It is found in almost every electronic product from handheld devices to mainframes. circuit packaged in a 208-pin Plastic Quad Flat Pack (PQFP (Plastic Quad Flat Package) Refers to many varieties of QFP chip packages, which are molded in plastic. See QFP. ) with direct TTL-level interfaces to the PCI bus. It is available now and priced at $90 per unit in 100-unit volumes. The Bt8230EPFC is also supported by a powerful, highly flexible ATM evaluation system, the Bt8230EVS EVS European Voluntary Service EVS Environmental Science EVS Electric Vehicle Symposium EVS Enhanced Vision System EVS environmental studies EVS European Values Study EVS Electronic Verification System EVS Extreme Voltage Shutdown , that has been designed to provide significantly more resources and functionality than traditional ATM evaluation systems. The system is configured as a complete reference design with its own evaluation software, and will allow customers to substantially reduce their hardware and software design efforts, their R&D costs, and time to market for Bt8230-based products. Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, based in Newport Beach, Calif., comprises the Multimedia Communications Division (MCD), the Wireless Communications Division (WCD), the Network Access Division (NAD NAD: see coenzyme. ) and the Digital Infotainment Division. MCD is the world leader in facsimile and PC modem devices for personal communications electronics. WCD offers total system solutions for advanced cordless telephony and global positioning systems receiver engines. NAD offers a broad line of high-bandwidth communications and networking devices. The Digital Infotainment Division focuses on products for the digital consumer electronics information and entertainment markets. Rockwell is a global electronics company with leadership market positions in industrial automation, semiconductor systems, avionics and communications, with projected fiscal 1997 sales of approximately $8 billion and 44,000 employees. In March, Rockwell announced that it planned to spin off its automotive components business. This transaction is expected to be completed in September 1997. CONTACT: Rockwell Semiconductor Systems Eileen Algaze, 714/221-6849 eileen.algaze@nb.rockwell.com or The Benjamin Group Inc. Carolyn Fromm or Ruth Rosene, 714/245-7500 cfromm or rrosene@oc.tbgi.com |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion