Agere Systems and Huawei Technologies ink multi-million dollar deal for optical ICs

Agere Systems announced today that Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. will purchase a full suite of Agere's integrated circuits (ICs) for use in high-speed optical networking systems for metropolitan and access networks. Huawei is deploying its optical systems in networks across Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.

Under the multi-million dollar deal, Agere will provide chips for line cards, which handle multiple networking protocols, channels, reaches, and rates in optical transport systems.

"Huawei has proven its ability to bring high-speed, low cost networking to the metro and access segments as the fastest growing equipment provider," contends Mark Granahan, vice president for access and transport products at Agere Systems. "As the leading supplier of networking ICs to Huawei, we are proud to help support their success. The Agere solutions will help Huawei provide systems to their customers that enable new services at the lowest initial and ongoing cost and provide a seamless path to tomorrow's networks using Agere's flexible product portfolio."

A recent RHK report ranked Huawei No. 1 in the Asia-Pacific market with 15.4 % market share in optical transport products in 2001. According to RHK, China is the largest telecom market in the Asia-Pacific in 2002 and is expected to continue to be the largest through at least 2006. With a growing global presence, Huawei's sales outside China surged 156% last year.

Agere will provide Huawei with seven devices from its broad portfolio of optical networking ICs including framers, pointer-processors, cross-connects, data engines, and mixed-signal transceivers. Among the optical transport chips Agere is supplying to Huawei are the MARS 2.5G and MARS 10G framers, two key elements in the company's newly announced family of highly integrated systems-on-chip (SoC) for optical transport.

The deal with Huawei for Agere's optical transport ICs builds upon recent design wins for Agere's network aggregation and switching chips. "This announcement extends Agere's already strong relationship with Huawei into other key networking application and product areas," contends Frank Yi Liang, China country manager for Agere Systems. Huawei is also using Agere's 8207 CelXpres ATM switching chip in its multi-service access platform technology and Agere's ATM port controller (APC) processing chip in its broadband multi-service and access platforms.

The Agere solutions address optical line and switch fabric card, multiplexing, and digital cross connect card requirements for SDH, multi-service transport platforms (MSTP), and DWDM platforms supporting SONET/SDH services, including OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, and OC-192 and data services such as ATM, packet over SONET (PoS) and Gigabit Ethernet over SONET (GEoS).

For more information about Agere Systems (Allentown, PA), visit the company's Web site at is www.agere.com.