Quake Makes Ethernet IC Sonet-Ready

WAYNE, N.J. — Quake Technologies Inc. will introduce a 10-Gbit transceiver Monday (June 7) that is equipped with Sonet framing capabilities, giving designers an ability to deliver Sonet transport capabilities in Ethernet switch and router designs.

A wide-area network interface sublayer the IEEE adopted several years ago allows Ethernet box manufacturers to add Sonet transport capabilities to emerging 10-Gbit Ethernet designs. Interest in the WAN interface sublayer is rising as cable operators look to aggregate voice-over-Internet Protocol streams on separate IP networks and as financial institutions look to move large amounts of data quickly over the WAN, said Dan Trepanier, president and chief executive officer of Quake.

Noting the shift, Quake started crafting a WAN interface sublayer-enabled transceiver. The result, the QT2030, taps many of the same blocks used in earlier transceivers, including an 8B/10B encoding block, a 64B/65B physical-coding sublayer block and a serializer/deserializer block. For WAN interface sublayer services, the company added a lightweight framer that supports the transport of Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic over a Sonet network.

The transceiver delivers a Xaui interface on the system side to handle both Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel streams. On the line side, it provides a serial interface that operates between 9.95 and 10.57 Gbits/second and can be configured to send traffic over a local-area network or a Sonet/WAN connection. To connect over a WAN, the device can be configured to send traffic through the on-board framer, Trepanier said. Or designers may bypass this framer to send traffic out over a LAN connection, he said. Like past Quake devices, the QT2030 comes equipped with an MDIO/MDC interface.

Built at 0.18 micron, the QT2030 provides 1.8- and 3.3-volt operation and dissipates 2.3 watts when the framer is used (2.1 W otherwise). It is sampling now in a 15 x 15-mm plastic BGA, priced at $300 apiece in low volume.