Vendors are rapidly filling the market with enabling technology for G.fast, a technology that can help telcos achieve transmission rates up to a gigabit on traditional phone wires. Broadcom announced variants of several DSL chips that will now support G.fast and G.vector standards.
Earlier this month, Sckipio Technologies introduced a pair of G.fast chip sets, accompanied by announcements of G.fast network equipment and reference designs from Suttle, XAVi, Zinwell, VTech and Lantiq.
In August, Adtran announced a version of G.fast technology that will enable will enable VDSL2 and G.fast to coexist (a claim Broadcom is also making with its chips). Today, the company announced its technology is in trials with service providers in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. The company identified only Telecom Italia as a trial partner.
Broadcom’s new silicon supporting G.fast includes two analog front end chipsets and a modification of its BCM63138 system on a chip (SoC) used in home gateways.
The BCM65200 DSP and BCM65900 analog front-end VDSL chipsets feature on-chip vectoring and integrated G.fast support a new DSP architecture that enabled Broadcom to incorporate up to 36 lines of VDSL2 or six lines of G.fast, as well as high-speed vector interfaces the company said eliminate the need for external PHY and framing devices.
The devices are headed for high-density G.vector DSLAMs as well as new G.fast-based fiber-to-the-distribution point (FTTdp) products. They are currently sampling, Broadcom said.
With full backward-compatibility to existing VDSL and ADSL technologies, including simultaneous G.Fast and G.vector crosstalk cancellation, Broadcom claims the BCM65200/900 family is the only commercially available chipset to provide operators a means to selectively deploy G.fast to new customers in the same system as VDSL2, preventing the forklift upgrade required for alternative solutions.
Broadcom’s BCM63138 high-performance device with G.fast for home gateways also supports Gigabit dual-band concurrent Wi-Fi, multiport Gigabit Ethernet and multiline VoIP. It integrates a 1 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, with additional offload engines and dedicated routing accelerator, Broadcom said.
The SoC is currently in volume production.
