Telephony processors enable voice-over-data gear

By Maury Wright -- 12/17/2004

Long-touted but slow-to-market VOIP (voice-over-IP) technology seems again poised for widespread deployment. In North America, many consumers use VOIP gateways with their broadband Internet links to make cheap phone calls—especially international calls. Services such as Vonage make VOIP simple these days, but users claim spotty quality at times. Now, however, mainline telephone companies are looking at VOIP. And chip makers, including stalwarts such as Texas Instruments (www.ti.com), Broadcom (www.broadcom.com), and Intel (www.intel.com) are targeting the market. PMC-Sierra, meanwhile, just launched what may be the broadest family of VOIP chips for the subscriber premise on the market.

The PMC-Sierra MSP (multiservice-processor) family includes the MSP2015, 2020, 4000, and 5000 chips. The devices range in price from $9 to $90 (25,000 to 50,000) based on both the chip the customer selects and software royalties for functions such as voice codecs. At the low end, the MSP2015 is purely a MIPS-RISC-based device that targets SOHO (small-office/home-office) applications for VOIP in broadband gateways. The other chips combine DSP and MIPS cores to target applications ranging from complete analog telephone adapters to enterprise-class IP (Internet Protocol)-based private branch exchanges.

PMC-Sierra claims several technical advantages to their offering. First, the company claims that its codec delivers PSTN (public-switched-telephone-network)-quality voice service. And the company has optimized the VOIP and router algorithms to ensure that voice traffic gets priority. PMC-Sierra claims that the chips reduce voice latency to 87.6 msec and that that performance bests any competitive ICs.

Regardless of voice quality, the question remains about whether major service providers will roll out such VOIP equipment en masse. The Vonage-class market isn’t sufficient to warrant the attention of the big chip players that are targeting the market. Moreover, the mobile handset is a heady competitor for calls within North America.

Jon Ames, product marketing manager at PMC-Sierra, claims that you need to look beyond North American shores to foresee what’s to come in VOIP. Ames states, “Local tolls in the rest of the world are driving VOIP deployment. There are already 4 million subscribers in Japan. Asia will continue to ramp, and Europe will come online before there is real North American growth.”

PMC-Sierra, 1-408-239-8000, www.pmc-sierra.com.

© 2009, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.