Applied Micro Sees Inflection Point in OTN Market

Applied Micro Circuits Corp. has shipped 1 million 10G Optical Transport Network (OTN) ports and the company believes the technology has reached an inflection point for the industry. Shipments of AppliedMicro System-on-Chip ports to manufacturers of optical switch and routing equipment has risen by more than 50 percent over the last two years.

“OTN market adoption has reached a critical tipping point since it was first proposed a decade ago as a replacement for SONET/SDH technology in long-haul networks,” said Francesco Caggioni, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing for AppliedMicro. “We see the trend accelerating as all of our Tier-1 customers anticipate further OTN deployments to transport the exploding volume of Internet traffic over cost-effective, high-speed optical networks. We’ve seen our market share increase as carriers and network system manufacturers transform the Internet infrastructure to accommodate the ever-growing demand for datacenter, enterprise, video and mobile traffic.”

AppliedMicro is one of the early pioneers of OTN and first started shipping ports for this market in 2004 with its Rubicon family of products. Since then, AppliedMicro’s Yahara, Pemaquid, PQx and the recently introduced 100Gbps OTN transponder and muxponder solutions have provided Tier-1 customers with increased levels of integration for the continued expansion of network capacity and switching speeds.
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• In December 2010, AppliedMicro introduced a 100G Muxponder (multiplexing transponder) solution for Optical Transport Networks (OTN) featuring an integrated framer/mapper PHY and the company’s “SoftSilicon” flexibility . The 100G Muxponder can multiplex any combination of 10G and 40G client signals into a 100G OTN signal (OTU4).
• In November, AppliedMicro introduced a family of 100 Gbps optical network processors for the Packet-Optical Transport System (P-OTS) and IP-over-DWDM transport markets. Leveraging SoftSilicon programmable technology developed by TPack, the new devices support the recently-adopted 100GE (IEEE ) and OTU4 (ITU-T) interface standards. The first two new devices in the family, TPOT414 and TPOT424, are 100G transponders for metro/core OTN and packet networks. The devices interface directly to CFP or MSA-168 type optical modules for standalone transponder applications or for line cards in larger systems. AppliedMicro said its SoftSilicon technology enables the same device to be configured to run as an 100GE-OTU4 transponder or as an OTU4-OTU4 transponder. The soft approach also enables flexibility as specs are updated.
• Earlier in 2010, AppliedMicro acquired TPACK A/S, a developer of programmable chip solutions for packet transport networks, for $32 million in cash plus up to $5 million in cash earn-outs depending on performance milestones over the next eighteen months. TPACK, which is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, developed a “SOFTSILICON” solution implemented in Altera FPGA devices. The SOFTSILICON products are used in 10, 40 and 100 Gbps OTN switching and routing network equipment.