Nikkei Electronics Asia -- February 2007
Industry & Market
PMC-Sierra Steps Up Activities in China

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Jan 26, 2007 18:29 Nikkei Electronics Asia
PMC-Sierra Inc of the US, a provider of high-speed broadband communications and storage semiconductors, has expanded its operations in China with the relocation of its China company, PMC-Sierra Technology (Shanghai) Ltd, to a new facility in Shanghai Zhangjiang Semiconductor Industrial Park in December 2006.

According to Tom Sun, the company¡Çs vice president, Asia Pacific Operations, the new facility will not only add more local sales and field application engineer support, but will also carry out some research and development work. ¡ÈWe do software development and are moving forwards with many different types of access technology,¡É he said. ¡ÈAnd we also do storage software development for fiber channel, following our acquisition of the storage semiconductor business of Agilent Technologies in late 2005. We have been buying a lot of companies and are putting them to work to create synergy for us.¡É

EPON Standard in China
Sun said he is very excited about the company¡Çs prospects in the China market, and expects to see it step up its activities in China. Recently the company developed the industry¡Çs first EPON optical network unit (ONU) and optical line terminal (OLT), especially designed to support the algorithms and features defined by China Telecom for deployments in China. China is moving ahead with its adoption of the IEEE EPON standard, and China Telecom has defined specific features for EPON systems to be deployed in China which require the implementation of both ONU and OLT. The EPON solutions from PMC-Sierra (the PAS6301-EPON ONU SoC, and the PAS5201-EPON OLT SoC) make it the first company to provide both ONU and OLT chips with China Telecom features, including data encryption and decryption algorithms, prioritization and QoS procedures and classification protocols.

Meanwhile, PMC-Sierra has developed a GPON OLT reference design that works with the GPON OLT developed by Chinese communications company ZTE. Xu Ming, general manager of ZTE¡Çs Network Business Unit, said that PMC-Sierra is the leader in Asia¡Çs PON market, and it understands the need for interoperability in developing high volume markets. The joint GPON test has exceeded ZTE¡Çs expectations, he added.

by Keith Chan