20 October 2003 San Diego, CA Lightwave -- Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) today announced the PRS 80G chipset, the latest member of the Packet Routing Switch (PRS) multi-purpose switch fabric family, recently acquired from IBM. The PRS 80G chipset will address the space and power requirements challenging equipment manufacturers, network service providers, and enterprise customers by providing high-performance switching capabilities in a low-power, compact switch fabric design.
An integral part of a system solution with AMCC network processors, traffic managers, framers and software tools, the PRS 80G will enable faster time-to-market for OEMs addressing the wide range of high-bandwidth, demanding applications in the metro Ethernet, WAN multi-services and enterprise (data centers, network attached storage/storage area network, high-end LANs) space. To facilitate the evaluation and prototyping of complete solutions, a reference switch board featuring the PRS 80G will be available in a standards-based, Advanced TCA-compliant form factor.
"The backward compatibility of the PRS 80G will make it possible to co-populate both current and new line cards in a single chassis, facilitating customer-driven evolution paths from existing systems while protecting system vendor and end-user investments in existing line and switch cards," said Gilles Garcia, AMCC spokesman.
As part of this announcement, AMCC is also introducing the PRS C48X and PRS C192X switch fabric interface chips. The PRS 80G switch, when used in conjunction with these fabric interface devices, will provide 40-Gbit/sec (single chip) or 80-Gbit/sec (two chips) full-duplex aggregate user bandwidth with a per-port speed-up factor of two, fully enabling system services such as security, deep packet inspection, web caching, and SSL in demanding Packet-over-SONET (PoS) and Ethernet applications. The device can attach up to 16 x multi-Gigabit Ethernet/OC-48c adapter cards equipped with the PRS C48X fabric interface chip, or 4 x 10 Gbit/sec (OC-192c) adapter cards equipped with the PRS C192X fabric interface chip, or any intermediate combination. In a two-device configuration, the PRS 80G will enable the development of scalable single-stage switch fabrics with up to 32-port attachments for protocol engines that support OC-48c or any multiple Gigabit Ethernet applications, or up to 8 ports for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and OC-192c applications, or any intermediate mix of those.
The PRS C192X chip will be configurable in subport mode, allowing switch designs with up to four multi- Gigabit Ethernet/OC-48c network processors per line card; compared with previous generations of similar PRS devices, the PRS C192X can - in conjunction with the PRS 80G - reduce the number of chips required by greater than 50% in new 40 to 80-Gbit/sec system designs. The PRS 80G device will be the first of the PRS family of fabrics to utilize IBM 0.13-micron technology and the latest IBM 3.2 Gbit/sec high-speed serial links. The solution is hardware and software compatible with the PRS 64Gu, Q-64G, C48 and C192, protecting customers' existing investments and enabling flexible evolution paths.
The PRS 80G will begin sampling in Q1, 2004, and the C48X and C192X interface devices will be sampling in early Q2, 2004.