Chip, equipment makers rolling out DSL products
June 01, 1998, TechWeb News
Silicon Valley - Looking for the right formula to enable them to succeed in the booming Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) business, chip and equipment makers are rolling out a new round of products or are quietly licensing their architectures to others.
At the Supercomm '98 trade show in Atlanta next week, some chip makers will tout intriguing hybrid products including those that combine ADSL, T1, and perhaps other functions on the same device, sources said. Many other companies are pushing pure forms of xDSL. Still others are taking the licensing approach in order to win widespread acceptance for their architectures. For example, Cisco Systems Inc. will announce at this week's Computex computer trade show in Taipei a deal to license its ADSL technology to Taiwan-based modem makers, sources said.
The total market for xDSL chipsets is expected to grow to 29 million units and $905 million in revenue by 2002 from 300,000 units and $10 million in revenue this year, according to In-Stat Inc., Scottsdale, Ariz. At present, there are several different-and incompatible-flavors of xDSL competing in the market,including Asymmetric DSL (ADSL), G.Lite (Universal DSL), High-Bit-Rate DSL (HDSL), HDSL2, Rate-Adaptive DSL (RADSL), Single-Line DSL (SDSL), and Very-High-Bit-Rate DSL (VDSL).
There will be eventual winners-and losers-among the various xDSL
architectures, according to Gerry Kaufhold, a senior analyst at In-Stat.
"All of the [xDSL technologies] are being deployed right now," he said. "In the next 24 months, we will begin to see a larger deployment of HDSL in the business environment. But in terms of unit volumes, the eventual winner in the DSL market will be G.Lite."
G.Lite refers to a stripped-down version of ADSL proposed by the Universal ADSL Working Group. Led by Compaq Computer Corp., Intel Corp., and Microsoft Corp., G.Lite is still in the standards stage and will not be ratified until the end of this year. G.Lite is a "splitterless" technology that downloads data at 1.5 Mbits/s and uploads at 640 Kbits/s.
While a growing number of chip makers are scrambling to develop
G.Lite-based products, a few companies hope to provide a smoother migration path from analog to digital by developing hybrid ICs that combine 56-Kbit/s modem and ADSL functions.
At last month's Networld+Interop '98 trade show in Las Vegas, Lucent got the ball rolling by announcing a 56K/ADSL chipset called WildWire. As expected, Motorola Inc. last week announced that it has added 56-Kbit/s, V.90-based modem capabilities to its ADSL chipset, called CopperGold.
This week, Rockwell will roll out two versions of a 56K/ADSL chipset, both of which will use Falcon, a technology licensed from PairGain Technologies Inc., Tustin, Calif., that is based on ADSL and Discrete Multitone (DMT) line code.
"Having a DSL [modem] only is not going to be good enough for consumers," said Mike Neshat, director of client DSL products at Rockwell's Personal Computing Division, Newport Beach, Calif. "We believe that [a hybrid 56K/ADSL modem] will be required for the next two years because not every place in the world will offer DSL services."
Rockwell's chipsets support the V.90, full-rate ADSL and G.Lite standards. One of the chipsets is a three-chip solution designed for external modems that incorporates Falcon, an analog IC, and a V.90 device that supports Universal Serial Bus. The other chipset, designed for internal modems, includes Falcon, an analog front-end interface, and a PCI-based ASIC.
Rockwell also sells two other types of xDSL chips: HDSL and SDSL. HDSL
uses two twisted pairs of copper wire to send data at 1.544 Mbits/s and receive it at 2.048 Mbits/s. SDSL is as fast as HDSL, but uses a single twisted pair of copper wire.
"Most of the users for full-rate [HDSL and SDSL] will be in the business arena," Neshat said. "When it comes to G.Lite, that's a whole different ball game. In the next few years, G.Lite will become very dominant in the consumer areas."
Not every company is pushing hybrid chips and G.Lite. Broadcom Corp.,
Irvine, Calif., is the only chip maker that supports VDSL, which can download data up to 52 Mbits/s and upload at 2.3 Mbits/s.
Broadcom's rival in the LAN chip arena, Level One Communications Inc.,
Sacramento, Calif., is pushing another emerging architecture, known as
HDSL2. This standard enables integrated service providers to deliver full T1 over a single twisted pair of wire.
While VDSL and HDSL2 are slowly garnering some support among ISPs,
other companies are looking to get more widespread support for their xDSL technologies. Recently, Alcatel Microelectronics, Richardson, Texas, licensed its full-rate ADSL technology to three companies: Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Integrated Telecom Technology Inc., and STMicroelectronics. Not to be outdone, Cisco, the San Jose-based LAN equipment giant, has quietly begun licensing its ADSL technology to a group of Taiwan-based modem and LAN equipment makers: Askey Computer Corp., DB Networks Ltd., GVC Corp., Zyxel Communications Corp., and others.
Cisco, which will announce the licensing deals at this week's Computex, last year set up a lab in Taiwan in order to transfer technology and test software. |
