March 1, 2001–Ottawa, Canada–Quake Technologies Inc., a fabless semiconductor start up, announced today that it is developing two revolutionary physical-layer chips for high-speed optical networking applications.
“Optical networking is the leading approach being developed to satisfy the insatiable demand for bandwidth. Quake is revolutionizing the industry by tackling the problems associated with the demand for bandwidth caused by new or improved applications,” says Petre Popescu, Quake’s vice president of engineering. “The upcoming QT2010 and the QT1090 product releases are part of Quake’s ongoing product vision. We are striving to offer market-responsive products with a strong focus on system-friendly integration.”
System-friendly integration promises few interfaces to worry about within the system, smaller footprint, reduced power consumption, and improved economics.
The QT2010, believed to be the first commercially available 10 gigabit per second (Gb/s) serializer/deserializer (SerDes) transceiver, is designed to deliver high performance, Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) compliant, 9.953 to 10.3 Gb/s speeds for Ethernet and synchronous optical network (SONET)/synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) applications.
The QT2010 consumes 2.2W of power from a single 3.3V supply, and offers SONET-compliant jitter performance and a high level of system-friendly integration within a compact plastic ball grid array package.
The QT1090 preamplifier is an integrated transimpedance-limiting amplifier, designed for fiber optic local area network (LAN), metropolitan area network (MAN), and wide area network (WAN) applications. Created to perform at high speed, this device boasts data rate capabilities in the 9.953 to 10.7 Gb/s range with a very low 170mW power consumption, making it ideal for applications such as SONET/SDH or 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Together, the QT2010 and QT1090 two-chip physical-layer solution requires a single 3.3V supply and consumes less than 2.5W.
Samples of both products are now available. Shipping of production volumes will start in the fourth quarter of 2001.