13 October 2003 Newport Beach, CA Lightwave -- Mindspeed Technologies Inc. has developed a new family of four programmable traffic management and Layer 2 internetworking processors. The new TSP3 family offers equipment manufacturers the ability to use one system design across multiple port speeds for a wide range of applications in enterprise, access, and metropolitan networks.
The OC-3 (155 Mbit/sec) M27480, 2xOC-3 (310 Mbit/sec) M27481, OC-12 (622 Mbit/sec) M27482, and OC-48 (2.5 Gbit/sec) M27483 TSP3 devices and companion Ethernet-enabled PortMakerIII firmware applications are the third generation of an architecture deployed and tested in the field by service providers since 1999. Mindspeed has shipped more than 700,000 programmable network processor products to leading customers worldwide.
PortMakerIII applications will include Ethernet-enabled packet and cell traffic management and Ethernet-to-asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) bridging. The first binary application package features AAL5 with ATM-to-MPLS interworking, which enables bandwidth-efficient transport of legacy ATM cell traffic over next-generation MPLS networks.
"Mindspeed's new TSP3 family extends our long heritage in programmable traffic management solutions to Layer 2 internetworking with complete firmware compatibility across the product line," says Tom Medrek, senior vice president and general manager of Mindspeed's broadband internetworking systems business unit. "Our Ethernet-enabled PortMakerIII firmware offers the fine-grained traffic management required to enable ATM-quality service level agreements on converged packet-based networks.
"With the TSP3 family of devices and companion PortMakerIII firmware, our equipment customers can now design one line card that can be used interchangeably for a full range of applications, amortizing their engineering investment across equipment types," Medrek added.
The TSP3 family enables the fine-grained quality of service (QoS) required to provision new services across a full range of packet- and cell-based networks such as ATM, next-generation SONET, packet-over-SONET, Ethernet, Ethernet over SONET (EoS), and frame relay designs.
The new family of TSP3 devices is designed for a variety of broadband aggregation and multi-service switching equipment in enterprise, access, and metropolitan-area networks, such as DSLAMs, next-generation digital loop carriers (DLCs), cable head ends, and fixed and mobile wireless gateways. Each device in the family is cost, performance, and feature optimized for target applications, and offers a wide range of data path interfaces including Ethernet, POS, UTOPIA, and PCI. To speed time-to-market, equipment manufacturers can use binary PortMakerIII firmware applications or develop their own customized applications.
The OC-48 M27483 device architecture is based on two programmable Octave microprocessor cores with multiple co-processing engines designed to manage packets and cells at up to 2.5 Gbits/sec in single-service or multi-service applications. The 32-bit RISC Octave processors include specialized instructions for interworking and traffic management, providing efficient dispatching of parallel hardware operations while performing traffic stream processing functions. The integrated co-processing engines enable the M27483 to achieve optical wire-speed performance.
The PortMakerIII firmware provides fine-grained traffic management capabilities including queuing, hierarchical shaping, scheduling, policing, congestion management, and switching up to 256,000 packet or cell streams. It manages Layer 2 protocol interworking by transporting Layer 2 frames over MPLS, IP-to-ATM (AAL2 and AAL5 segmentation and reassembly), Ethernet-to-ATM, frame relay-to-ATM, and IMA. The firmware is also available with a source-code license to allow product differentiation and multi-service operation with other PortMakerIII or custom applications.
Mindspeed also supplies a PCI-based evaluation board and system development tools with both the binary and source-code versions of PortMakerIII.
The M27483, M27482, M27481, and M27480 TSP3 devices are priced at $425, $250, $140, and $99, respectively, in quantities of 1,000. Samples of the M27483 and M27482 will be available in November 2003, and samples of the M27481 and M27480 will be available in the second quarter of calendar 2004.