Cortina's universal PON reference design speeds time to market

Cortina Systems, Inc. has announced the general availability of a universal turnkey platform that enables original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) to customize their EPON/GPON optical networking unit (ONU) designs and bring them to market more quickly.

The optimized reference board design is based on Cortina Systems’ CS8232 dual-mode EPON/GPON ONU system-on-a-chip (SoC), royalty-free source code for turnkey OAM/ONT management and control interface (OMCI) and TR-069 stack, and an open CPU platform to store customization details.

"The FTTH market in China is divided between EPON and GPON," said Dr. David Li, CTO and general manager of Hisense Broadband Access BU. "Our customers are constantly looking for ready-to-go, carrier-compliant, and proven ONU solutions that can be easily configured into either EPON/GPON mode. With the Cortina CS8232 turnkey platform, we are able to offer them a complete solution within a very short time."

"By incorporating EPON and GPON into the Cortina CS8232 SoC and offering a universal turnkey solution with both hardware and software, Cortina ensures our system vendor customers and ODM partners are able to hit the market with the flavor needed in the time needed, with very little upfront investment and risk," said Lup Ng, senior product line manager, Cortina Systems.

The flexible architecture of Cortina’s CS8232 dual mode EPON/GPON ONU system-on-chip allows it to be configured as a full-featured home gateway unit or a cost-effective data ONU, enabling system vendors to maximize their resources by designing one product for the entire market, the company claims. With the chip vendor’s turnkey software, customers can create a design and bring it to market with little R&D investment and technical risk, Cortina says. Customers also now have source code access to the Cortina OMCI and TR-069 stack, giving them the option to make any modifications and upgrades when carrier requirements change.

Cortina says the turnkey platform has gone through stringent carrier testing and interoperability testing against commercially available OLT equipment from all major vendors. Specifically, the stack is qualified for various GPON specifications from China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile. Popular ONU configurations are supported, including single-port ONU for single family units (SFU), single-port SFU with single-channel voice over IP (VoIP), and dual-port home gateway unit with VoIP. These configurations can be in either EPON or GPON mode.

The turnkey software package includes ITU-T G.988- and ITU-T G.984-compliant OMCI stack, IEEE 802.3ah- and IEEE 802.3av-compliant OAM stack, and OMCI/OAM extensions for various carriers. It also features support for PON and UNI interfaces configurations, forwarding engine and dual VLAN tags operations, deep packet classification and subscriber quality-of-service (QoS) management, multicast (IGMP/MLD) snooping, command line interface (CLI), remote image upgrade, and a ready-to-go web management interface.

The Cortina CS8232 devices are in production and the turnkey platform is available now.

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