Motorola CG delayed yet again...
The long overdue Motorola Copper Gold ADSL chip was delayed yet one more time. This is obviously great news for both ADI and Aware, because it gives them that much more time to penetrate their markets. Also there is considerable cachet attached to being able to deliver a working product on time. Other companies respect that.
IHMO the TI ADSL chipset will be delayed. All indications are that it should arrive on schedule, but on projects of this magnitude unexpected delays are the norm (ADI also suffered through an unexpected delay.). If it actually is released in producted quantities on Oct 9, then the joke is on me, but I don't expect it. If it is delayed then it won't be ready until early 98.
Until then , ADI/Aware will have the only operational 2nd generation ADSL chip available.
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Motorola Inc.
disclosed that its long-awaited CopperGold transceiver for asymmetric digital
subscriber line (ADSL) may not be available for sampling until next year.
. Among developers working with
discrete-multitone (DMT) coding, only Analog Devices Inc. and a handful of
OEMs with ASIC-based solutions are ready to produce. ADI moved into
volume production with its AD20msp910 chip set early this month.
Motorola's semiconductor products sector (Phoenix) now says that the
much-anticipated CopperGold transceiver won't see general sampling before
very late this year or early 1998. Pete Bingham, vice president for
communication and transmission access in Motorola's new networking and
computer-products group, candidly conceded that the effort to integrate
data-conversion and DSP blocks proved a bigger challenge than expected.
Though electrically functioning samples have been in test since the summer,
Motorola is testing all software dependencies of the complex ADSL
protocols to insure a bug-free silicon release.
Bankrupt partner
Some of Motorola's woes were not of its own making. Its partner in
software, Sourcecom Inc. (Santa Clarita, Calif.), which also generated
several interesting concepts for router software on a PCMCIA card,
declared bankruptcy this summer. But Motorola's nearest competitors aren't
gloating.
"We're not happy to see CopperGold delayed, since it slows the market to a
certain extent," said Russ Johnsen, vice president for communication products
at Analog Devices here. "Most carriers and larger OEMs, particularly in
Europe, want to be standards-based, and to them that means DMT. When
there's only one vendor of standard DMT parts out there, some customers
may postpone their plans. Oth-ers might look to a temporary CAP solution."
Indeed, some OEMs are offering rate-adaptive DSL based on CAP as
another alternative. PairGain Technologies Inc. (Tustin, Calif.), for example,
introduced a series of RADSL-based central-office products last week.
ADI hopes to extend its DMT options by concluding a new license
agreement with Amati Communications Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), nominally the
closest competitor to ADI's key ADSL partner, Aware Inc. Johnsen said the
deal reached with Amati last week does not represent a distancing from
Aware, but "a necessary move to gain rights to certain Amati patents which
are key to implementing Issue 1 handshake protocols within the ANSI
standard. Some customers want full ANSI standards compliance, and we
wanted to make sure that included the Amati technology."
Other companies are trying to broaden their efforts in the types of DSL
services they support. Rockwell Semiconductor Systems (Newport Beach,
Calif.) last week joined the HDSL-2 Alliance formed last spring by PairGain,
Level One Communications Inc. (Sacramento, Calif.) and ADC
Telecommunications Inc. (Portland, Ore.). HDSL-2 is an emerging ANSI
standard for carrying 1.5-Mbit/s speeds bidirectionally over single pairs of
copper. Brooktree Corp., the company acquired by Rockwell, was one of
the original developers of HDSL, a two-pair solution for T1 speeds.
Still open for interpretation are the midspeed DSL services from 128 kbits/s
to 1.5 Mbits/s. Level One has been a strong proponent of what it calls
"MDSL," while Rockwell/Brooktree has pushed a "DSL/384" solution based
on the 2B1Q coding used in ISDN.
Motorola, however, is sticking with ADSL, since "the interim technologies
have no interoperability standards," said group marketing director Phil Grove.
Nevertheless, Motorola's familiarity with ISDN T and U interfaces may give
the company a chance to participate in "IDSL" (ISDN over DSL) markets. |
