John M. - 1968
JW -- that 1968 date was probably from the company before it was ICOT, don't you think.<<
Yes! It's just strange that it leads back to Luca's and a 1968..?
Would like to here the entire story sometime.
In a State Far Far Away -- CopperWars
Glad you lived through the NY Taxis rides.. If the family begins to forget, and starts to question your driving again, take a trip to Taipei Taiwan.
Not sure if this story has been posted or not....
EE TIMES
December 23, 1996, Issue: 933
Section: Best 1996 Technologies
Net chips on integration path
By Loring Wirbel
(snip)
First boosts
Asymmetric DSL got its first boost from telcos that wanted to move into interactive TV provisioning in the early 1990s. ADSL was going to be a necessary portion of every set-top box, and startups such as Amati Communications Inc. and Aware Inc. developed special modems based on banks of discrete DSP processors and D/A and A/D converters.
Although the American National Standards Institute decided on an ADSL line-encoding method called Discrete Multitone (DMT), the Paradyne division of AT&T made heavy inroads into carriers with its own nonstandard line coding called Carrierless Amplitude-Modulation/Phase-Modulation, or CAP.
The past year has seen plenty of noise but only some product offerings in ADSL, though the next six months should separate the real players from the noisemakers.
In DMT worlds, the most eagerly anticipated device is the single-chip CopperGold transceiver from Motorola Inc., slated for first quarter 1997 introduction. The MC14560 processor is to handle all channel mux/demux chores, as well as Reed-Solomon forward error correction and echo cancellation. Motorola is promising downstream support of 8 Mbit/s speed, as well as rate adaptivity in 32-kbit/s increments.
Motorola is integrating virtually everything but the host controller and the line driver-the latter has been implemented separately by Motorola as the MC03AX1456. Given the high voltages that line drivers must support in an ADSL topology, the devices are unlikely to be integrated into DSP processors anytime soon. Phil Grove, director of wireline communications marketing at Motorola, said that real estate constraints in subscriber modems will make the CopperGold a popular alternative as soon as the device samples.
But Motorola faces some tough competition from Analog Devices Inc. (Norwood, Mass.), which shipped samples last summer of a chip set that moved Discrete Multitone (DMT)-based ADSL from 24 chips to five.
DSP functions in the new AD20msp910 family are implemented in a
general-purpose ADSP-2183 fixed-point device (a change from an earlier approach based on the Sharc DSP) and a dedicated processor for
performing DMT line encoding. Ian Ramsden, product-line manager for DSL at ADI, argued that it may be better to keep traditional DSP
functions and data-conversion functions in separate devices, based on separate optimized process technologies, rather than opt for the single-chip approach taken by Motorola.
Efficient designs
OrcKit Communications Ltd., an Israel-based company that has
implemented some of the most efficient system-level designs for HDSL, ADSL and the future VDSL, can take downstream speeds to the ATM
rate of 51 Mbits/s. OrcKit signed an agreement last summer with Harris Corp.'s semiconductor sector (Melbourne, Fla.), which already produces line drivers and DSP filter blocks. If Harris moves into production with Orc-Kit DSP and analog front-end designs quickly, it could play an important role in the DMT camp.
Amati, a startup that once was a close partner of Motorola, signed deals with Texas Instruments Inc. and NEC Electronics Inc. in 1996 to work with these alternate vendors for both ADSL and VDSL devices. The TI accord leverages use of TI general-purpose TMS320 processors, though this could be the starting point for a TI role in xDSL-optimized standard products. NEC will be Amati's primary partner in VDSL and plans to have DSP devices for this high-speed option available in 1997. Whether TI or NEC can integrate DSP and analog functionality in a timely manner for this fast-moving market, however, remains to be seen.
If the ATM and DSL markets merge next year, watching the market
leaders may require a three-dimensional grid.
You can find the full story on the Tech Wire Site..
techweb.com |
