ADSL Chip Giant Turns Its Gaze To Optical FTTP
2004-06-09 17:18 (New York)
After two years of product development, Centillium
Communications [CTLM] is about to make its big play in optical
broadband semiconductors. The company's hoping it can duplicate its
success selling ADSL circuits with a new line of optical widgetry
targeted squarely at the emerging fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) market.
For starters, Centillium says it's already landed a contract
with a company that's been selected as a supplier to NTT [NTT] for the
massive Japanese FTTP buildout. Like Lucent [LU] proxy Amedia Networks
[AANI], which is a systems house and not a chip house so the two
companies don't compete head on, Centillium won't say who that partner
is quite yet.
Centillium's plan to enter the optical market hasn't exactly
been a secret - there has been a fairly general description of what it
planned to do on the Centillium Web site.
Indeed, it started shipping one optical chip a couple of months
ago, sort of testing the waters as it were. But that chip, a
continuous-mode transceiver called Apollo aimed 1 GB/s Ethernet point-
to-point optical equipment, is for use in modules. The real play, says
Armando Pereira, general manager of Centillium's optical business unit,
is going to be in a family of Ethernet passive optical network (EPON)
chips for FTTP hardware.
The EPON Play
Centillium hopes to convince the industry to eschew BPON, the
technology that's been used in the majority of FTTP solutions today, in
favor of EPON. There are, of course, other competitors in the EPON
space already trying to do exactly the same thing. Pereira named
TechNovis and Israel's Passave as players his company must beat. Both,
he notes, are startups that are far smaller than 450-man Centillium,
which recorded a healthy $125 million in sales last year and which has
an enviable $90 million in the bank to finance growth with no debt.
Pereira adds Centillium has let his unit function almost as a
standalone, giving him the leeway to have "the quickness of a startup
company." At the same time, he continues, his unit "is inside of a
public company" so that "I have the enviable position of not having to
fund-raise." Pereira's been the fund raising route, by the way, as co-
founder and CEO of Alloptic.
In a first look at Centillium's game plan, Pereira tells Fiber
Optic Forecast that Centillium's "killer" chips are going to include
system-on-a-chip affairs, using mixed digital and analog technology.
The still-unannounced chips should be ready to sample some time in the
next 90 days or so, according to Pereira, with full production starting
in the fourth quarter.
SoC Designs
System on a chip (SoC) design, of course, reduces the need for
additional components and, thus, lowers cost. That's critical to the
Centillium game plan, Pereira says.
"We are very much aware that the world already has ADSL, and the
world has point-to-point optics. Both have established price points
that we need to compete with," he says. The pricing Centillium plans,
he adds, will make it possible to build equipment that costs between
$100 and $120 per port.
The two SoC chips Centillium's got brewing in the labs are a
central-office EPON optical line termination (OLT) SoC code named Colt
and a companion customer-premise EPON optical network unit (ONU) SoC
named Mustang. Both Colt and Mustang mate with Zeus, a transceiver chip
under development by Centillium, to build a central office OLT or CPE
ONU. Zeus will support 155 Mb/s, 622 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s configurations.
Pereira jokes that the name "Zeus" and the already-released Apollo were
chosen because "the transceiver chips are difficult to do, so we went
with Greek gods."
The final piece of the chip family Centillium is readying is a
broadband service processor code named Unicorn. Unicorn will mate with
Zeus and Mustang in CPE applications and, among other things, it will
have advanced security and firewall capabilities. It also will support
advanced VoIP services both with and without compression, according to
product descriptions provided to Fiber Optics Forecast by Centillium.
Japanese Market
Pereira says the unannounced Japanese contract was based on
early versions of the chips and evaluation boards that were provided to
NTT, rather than on early silicon of the final chips as they have
emerged. He also notes that, although about a million FTTP
installations already have been completed in Japan, all of them were
BPON. Equipment built using Centillium's chips is expected to be the
first EPON used in the Japanese FTTP buildout. That first one million
ports, moreover, is only a fraction of the total available market in
the Japanese FTTP deployment. Current estimates are that more than two
million more FTTP ports will be added in Japan's 2005 fiscal year,
Pereira says.
Centillium, of course, also hopes to get its share of the
business as FTTP starts to build in the United States. In planning for
that business, Pereira's using conservative estimates that there will
be 200,000 ports in the United States in the current fiscal year, and
about 500,000 installed in FY05. Of course, Verizon [VZ] alone already
has started a rollout it says will hit a million ports. But Pereira
says that he prefers to build his business plan on more conservative
numbers, until such time as Verizon's million ports become more than
just promises with no purchase orders behind them.
>>Armando Pereira, Centillium, 510/771-3700<<
FOR MORE INFORMATION on this or any other story from Fiber Optics
Forecast, June 9, 2004, please call PBI Media, LLC's Client Service
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