December 14, 2005 Camarillo, CA -- Vitesse Semiconductor has announced two additions to its SONET/SDH Time Slot Interchange (TSI) grooming switch family: the VSC9190 50-Gbit/sec TSI switch and the VSC9191 100-Gbit/sec TSI switch. Both devices are designed to reduce the power and complexity of SONET grooming applications, while simplifying system level design processes.
The company says the devices reduce power requirements by more than 50% over comparable products. Also, by incorporating automatic protection switching and rate aggregation into a single device, the devices can reduce board chip count by a factor of five, according to the company.
The company says its TSI switches perform the necessary functions of deskewing, switching, and regenerating SONET/SDH signals at the STS-1/STM-0 level. The company says the VSC9190 and VSC9191 address these complex requirements within access and metro equipment such as SONET/SDH multiservice switches, add-drop multiplexers, optical switches, and DWDM long haul and metro equipment.
The devices support dual rate 2.5 Gbit/sec or 622 Mbit/sec I/O speeds and feature a fully non-blocking memory-based switch core with single-step programming capability. The company says the devices' bit-slicing technology can enable fabric configurations up to 1.36 Tbit/sec with low chip counts. The technology routes traffic to and from scalable hubs based on the company's VSC9295 340 Gbit/sec single-chip TSI. The devices also use 2.5-Gbit/sec TFI-5 and 622-Mbit/sec STS-12/STM-4 standards-based interfaces for connecting with existing line cards, backplanes, and ASIC infrastructure. Both devices feature the company's signal equalization technology (EQ) for enhanced signal integrity in high-speed systems.
"SONET isn't dead," contends Juan Garza, circuit switch product marketing manager for Vitesse. "The VSC9190 and VSC9191 are designed to enable OEMs to dispel the myth that SONET switching equipment is expensive and difficult to build."
In volume quantities, the VSC9190 is priced at $125 per unit and the VSC9191 is priced at $200 per unit. Both devices come in a 613-pin, FCBGA package. Samples and evaluation boards are available.