PMC Introduces 100G Optical Processor to Speed Big Data Networks

Semiconductor company PMC (PMCS) has introduced a new single-chip Optical Transport Network (OTN) processor supporting speeds of up to 100G speeds for OTN transport to meet the growing demands for high-speed networks to enable cloud computing and "Big Data" workloads.  The product was launched at the OFC/NFOEC (Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference) in Anaheim, California.

The  PM5440 DIGI 120G advances data center networks currently filled with 1G and 10G services, by supporting OTN Transport, aggregation and switching. The OTN processor to support on-demand re-sizing of ODUflex from 1G to 100G, as well as 10G, 40G and 100G speeds, with numerous configurations supported. For the OEM market, the DIGI 120G provides leverage, for a common hardware and software investment to rapidly build-out a portfolio of line cards.

"Explosive packet traffic growth projected from cloud services, residential broadband, and mobile backhaul is driving China Mobile to invest in scaling up our optical transport network to support 100G," said Bill Huang, General Manager of China Mobile Research Institute. "To maximize our 100G investment, we need OTN solutions from the 100G ecosystem that allow us to manage the optical bandwidth efficiently so we can economically deploy 100G and OTN switching on a wide scale."

PMC said the DIGI 120G offers the industry's only single-chip solution, the highest number of 10G ports enabling 2x higher density 10G OTN line cards, and flexible per port client-mapping of OTN, Ethernet, Storage, IP/MPLS and SONET/SDH. The PM5440 DIGI 120G along with the lower port density PM5441 DIGI 60G are available immediately.

"The optical transport network infrastructure needed to support Big Data requires efficient sharing and dynamic allocation of the optical network bandwidth," saidBabak Samimi, vice president of marketing and applications for PMC's Communications Business Unit. "Our DIGI 120G brings innovations that disrupt the economics of 100G by responding to the industry’s need to move towards dynamically configurable optical transport networks for delivering cloud services."