PMC Advances Fiber to the Home (FTTH)

 February 2012, PMC recently introduced several new products for the Fiber to the Home segment based on PON (Passive Optical Network) controllers. First introduced in 2006, they have now surpassed the 20M install ONU (Optical Network Unit). The new chips are for updating the bandwidth for the connections. PON is currently a 1G environment. EPON is symmetric at 1Gbps Up and down, GPON is symmetric 2.5Gbps Up and Down. The new chipsets are for 10GEPON which is 10Gbps Down and 1Gbps Up and XGPON is 10Gbps Down and 2.5Gbps Up. The new chipsets are for 10G EPON and XGPON and include both the ONU (user nodes) and OLT (central office node) Chips.

The new chips (10G EPON avail for sampling as full silicon product, and the XGPON products are in process compatible FPGA versions, now and available for samples close to Q3’12) are part of the continuing communication support that has a common software base and API for interacting with the both the MAC and PHY of the interface chips. The new PHYs feature a power saver and sleep modes which allows them to use 50%-80% less power over existing products. The SDK is set so the customer can develop a single software core for a central node and then develop and deploy different end points solutions from a common software base.

The parts are focused on the QOS for the application. The devices feature an integrated rate traffic manager and packet processor. The device also features an integrated test feature. Most optical networks use an OTDR (Optical Time Domain Reflectometer) to test the fiber connections and they require manual setup and interruption of service to use. The new devices have an integrated OTDR feature that supports software controlled test of all the optical lines connected to the chips as well as supplying constant (24/7) monitoring of the lines. This built in test offers a much lower cost of ownership than other solutions in the marketplace.

The PAS8000 OLT ( 4 products) and PAS9000 ONU (2 products) 10G-EPON products are targeted at new equipment on existing lines. The 10G-PON uplink products are designed to use a “PMC unified TM” which allows connection to the PMC WinPath3 NP SOC that allows for buffers, queues, and TM coordinated across the two devices (see figure) allowing “granular TM” and providing the highest carrier-grade of performance.
  

PMC 10G EPON and Winpath3 Processor