Vancouver, British Columbia-based PMC Sierra Inc has announced what it claims is the fastest commercially available Synchronous Optical Network/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy Asynchronous Transfer Mode physical layer chip, the 622Mbps PM5355 S/UNI-622. According to the company, the offering provides integration of SONET and SDH framers, cell processors, and First In First Out buffers to offer STS-12c or STM-4c operation for a seamless interface from wide to local area networks. The device is said to work in conjunction with commercially available serial-to-parallel and parallel-to-serial conversion and clock chips from vendors such as AT&T Corp, TriQuint Semiconductor Corp and Applied Micro Circuits Corp, as well as optical modules from the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co, AT&T and Sumitomo Corp. Sierra claims the product provides complete Asynchronous Transfer Mode cell processing and framing, operating at the standard SONET and SDH rates of 51.84Mbps, 155.52Mbps and 622.08Mbps, and supports the company’s Saturn, Compatible Interface for Physical Layer, SCI-PHY, device interconnect standard operating at 50MHz. According to the company, most Asynchronous Mode switches are currently designed to support up to 622Mbps per slot and can use the chip now. The chip is sampling now. Production prices will be $295 for quantities of 1,000-up.
