TranSwitch ships over 1 million Mustang EPON ONU chips

SHELTON, USA: TranSwitch Corp. announced that it has shipped over 1 million chips from its Mustang product family, a class of Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) protocol system-on-chips (SoC) for optical networking unit (ONU) applications.

The Mustang devices provide the core functionality for the ONU equipment being deployed by Japan’s leading telecommunications service provider as part of its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) strategy for offering triple-play (voice, internet and television) services.

“We are pleased to report this impressive milestone for our Mustang chips,” said Dr. Santanu Das, TranSwitch’s President and CEO. “The Mustang product family is integral to TranSwitch’s focus on offering a comprehensive platform of Access and Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) due to the high growth characteristics of this market segment. We look forward to leveraging our success in Japan as we accelerate the sales and marketing initiatives of our network edge products throughout Asia as well as other fast growing markets.”

The number of FTTH subscribers grew by 15 percent in the first six months of 2009, with more than 5.5 million new subscribers added worldwide, according to the latest update to the global ranking of FTTH economies, jointly issued by the three FTTH Councils of Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America.

According to industry analysts at ABI Research in their report PON and Active Ethernet FTTH Deployments, 55 percent percent of the world’s homes that will make their broadband connection over FTTH will receive video services by 2011. This figure is up from the 4 percent in 2005.

Japan and South Korea are ranked the highest in FTTH deployment, according to the report, with China possessing the greatest growth potential and one of the largest market opportunities. The build up of FTTH (and related deployments) in Europe has been growing with 120 new projects added in the last six months to a total of 233 projects at the end of June 2009, according to European telecom/IT consulting firm iDate.

Expanding TranSwitch’s end-to-end FTTH semiconductor portfolio, Mustang is a family of fully integrated, single chip, mixed-signal SoCs for gigabit EPON ONU applications.

This family of highly-integrated and low power EPON ONU SoCs is ideal for service providers deploying next generation networks (NGN) which support premium triple play services such as bandwidth-intensive IPTV while meeting government targets for reduced power consumption. These products enable new capabilities for television entertainment including interactivity, integration with voice and data communications, and value-added services while maintaining the highest quality of service.

The Mustang ONU simplifies service provider deployments by supporting interoperability with a variety of vendor optical line terminals (OLT) and supporting full compliance with relevant standards including IEEE 802.3ah and the NTT gigabit EPON Gist specification to ensure error-free, low latency, bandwidth efficient data transmission.

The Mustang product line, combined with TranSwitch’s Colt EPON OLT SoC and Atlanta 100 and 2000 communications processor families, reinforces TranSwitch’s market position as the only silicon vendor with complete, end-to-end EPON solutions for the “last mile.”