ATM

KSA has been architecting and developing ATM electronics, firmware and software since before ATM became a standard. We designed the backplane, timing circuitry and testbed for one of the first ATM products in the world, a digital cross-connect switch built for NTT. Dr. Sam Narayanan, now KSA's Vice President, Telecommunications Industry, was an original specifier, along with NTT, of the asynchronous transmission method which evolved into ATM. We have developed ATM subsystems for many voice, data and video subsystems. Here are highlights of some completed and ongoing product development efforts:

• Specifying and designing a 10/100 Mb ethernet/ATM/OC-3c switching module, including LAN emulation, to uplink virtual fast ethernet to ATM/SONET networks, including UNI 3.0, 31 and 4.0, traffic shaping and full MIB (SONET, ATM, ILMI, MIB-II)

• Architected and implemented the fault management system of a T-1/T-3/frame relay/ATM access multiplexer

• Designed OC-48 line card for a 20 Gb/sec ATM backbone switch

• Specified, architected, designed and manufactured the central control processor module for a 10 Gb/sec ATM backbone switch, utilizing a high-performance workstation packaged to fit on a central office equipment shelf plug-in card

• Designed the backplane and timing circuitry for a 1.2 Terabit ATM backbone switch

• Designed the backplane and timing circuitry, much of the firmware and the test system for one of the first ATM products in the world, a digital cross-connect switch

• Designed circuitry and software for OC-48, OC-12 and OC-3 ATM products.

• Specified, architected, designed and/or manufactured ATM, frame relay, FDDI, ISDN, token ring, ethernet, PCI (several speeds and "flavors"), MVIP, Fiberchannel, T-1/E-1, T-3/E-3, DS-0, DS-1, DS-3, OC-1, OC-3, OC-12, and other interfaces and line cards.

• Specified, architected and/or developed all or part of four separate T-1/T-3/frame relay/ATM/SONET access multiplexers for four separate clients, including the architecture and implementation of fault-management, call-processing and other software subsystems.

• Specified, architected, designed and manufactured the SONET OC-3c/ATM multiplexer that went into the first commercially-deployed video-on-demand system in the world. This was done on a total turnkey basis, in six and one-half months, including the manufacturing. All our customer, a leading telecommunications product manufacturer, provided was a draft requirements document. Timely delivery of this product resulted in our customer winning a $150 Million initial order for end-to-end Video-On-Demand systems from a major cable MSO.

• Specified and architected an MPEG-2/AAL-5/OC-3 (with an OC-12 follow-on version planned) Video-On-Demand server multiplexer, essentially a "mirror image" of the video multiplexer mentioned above, including an algorithm which optimizes bandwidth utilization and minimizes jitter propagation to the set-top, substantially reducing per-stream cost.

• Specifying and architecting a 622 Mb ATM-in/18 X 28 Mb MPEG-2 channel-out Video-on-Demand multiplexer/"Interactive Cable Gateway" (which also routes IP traffic when the channel isn't occupied with MPEG-2) on a single card which plugs into several different router platforms for deployment in cable head-ends. As of this writing, this architecture represents the lowest cost per port and per video stream in the industry, and the highest port density available, as well as the first-in-the-world implementation of MCNS, an encryption algorithm devised by the MSO's to protect their MPEG-2 payloads.

This card does ATM reassembly, dynamic PID remapping, MPEG dejitterization (KSA's V.P. of Engineering, Ron Todd, was the first to dejitterize an MPEG-2 signal across the public network, per the ATM Forum), IP insertion into MPEG private data, LAN emulation, routing to appropriate output stream, SNMP management via a MIB and contains the first-ever implementation of MCNS.

Scalable - a chassis can be configured for from one to 20 OC-3c equivalents (in increments of one OC-3c), resulting in initial low cost with an easy upgrade path. A stand-alone version would allow fine-grain scalability (per OC-3 or OC-12, not per ATM switch), which would be more cost-effective in smaller installations, or in initial installations that will expand over time.

• As of this writing, KSA is specifying and architecting, with our customer's stated intention to award us the design implementation and manufacturing, several head-end subsystems, all DVB-compliant, of a Switched Digital Video system, including an MPEG-2 encoder module; a multi-channel Variable Bit Rate (I-Frame and IPB-Frame) MPEG-2 encoder bank which accepts NTSC and PAL, analog and digital satellite feeds, real-time digital video, stored MPEG-2 and local ad insertion; an MPEG-2 decoder module; an MPEG-2/ATM multiplexer/remultiplexer; DS3 and OC-3 transport modules/line interface cards; and an SNMP-based network management system

• Architected, designed and prototyped a QPSK/ATM/MPEG-2 network interface module (NIM) to interface the termination of the coax to the set-top box in a Hybrid Fiber-Coax (HFC) system.

• Specified, to one degree or another, QPSK/MPEG-2/ATM interfaces to ethernet LAN's and to ATM workstations and the QAM and QPSK subsystems of hybrid fiber-coax systems.

• Wrote the specifications for the network control system for a video dialtone network which included protocols as well as hardware for end-to-end signaling and MPEG-2 video distribution, including retransmission mechanisms, power calibration algorithms and ranging algorithms and additional protocol elements which allow head end equipment to configure the operation of set-top terminals, to log errors on a channel and set top terminal basis, and to manage needed adjustments to the set top's transmit power level and its TDMA timing.

• Specified all elements of a hybrid fiber-coax system return path which used ATM cells as the basic unit from the set-top to the head end, augmented by forward error correction and a sequence-numbering scheme. The ATM cells are recovered in a demodulator which performs error correction and power level measurements as well as alignment measurements to a TDMA slot definition clock which allows ranging adjustments to be performed. Some aspects of the MAC-level protocol have been accepted by DAVIC.

• Developed techniques for providing consistent latency in the set-top messaging protocol (a single channel is shared by multiple set-tops in this system architecture) and for merging TDMA capabilities with Aloha capabilities, allowing for optimal sharing of upstream channels among multiple set-tops, etc. Also developed an Aloha scheme to allow limited-traffic interactive operations.

• Implemented multiple DS-3's onto a 20 Gb/sec ATM backbone switch

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