Wintegra Inc. (Wintegra) has introduced a new Carrier Ethernet Processor, WinIP3. The new WinIP3 processor provides performance over five times that of previous Wintegra processors and offers the foundation for new infrastructure products like Metro Ethernet Access Devices, GPON OLT line cards, VDSL systems, and cell site aggregation.

The new WinIP3 processors are the first products utilizing the company’s WinPath3 architecture, the 65 nanometer, high performance, low power silicon family.

The new WinIP3 processors are available with a broad range of Ethernet interfaces supporting 10/100 Megabit, 1 Gigabit, 2.5 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit networks. WinIP3 is the first processor of its kind to break the $50 price barrier in high performance configurations at up to 15 Million pps (Packets per Second), while configured for a rich set of carrier-class features in classification, policing, forwarding and shaping on many thousands of flows. Power consumption is best in its class with most configurations consuming less than 10 Watts with some as low as 5 Watts including integrated host processor core(s).

This family leverages the large installed base of the company’s datapath software suite, adding enhancements for MPLS and PBB (Provider Backbone Bridging), new protocols for the evolving Carrier Ethernet marketplace. Add to that other production ready data path protocols such as IPv4/IPv6 Routing, L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol), GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation), Link Aggregation, Ethernet OAM, Synchronous Ethernet, and PWE3 (Pseudo Wire Emulation Edge to Edge). These are complemented by strong QoS support for Ethernet OAM, ATM OAM, BFD, VCCV, Packet Classification, Per-flow queuing, Hierarchical shaping, packet policing and re-marking, buffer management using WRED, and statistics and metering. Data path protocols are available at no charge to WinIP3 customers.

Wintegra will also offer control path software to complement its data path offering, such as IEEE 1588 timing synchronization, IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation, IEEE 802.1ag Connectivity Fault Management, IEEE 802.3ah Link OAM and ITU-T Y.1731 Performance Monitoring. Control stacks are offered individually under a source code license.

We expect Carrier Ethernet products to grow significantly over the next 5 years even in the face of the downturn, and Wintegra is making good moves to grow its share of this segment, said Michael Howard, principal analyst and co-founder of Infonetics Research. Wintegra’s software set covers the emerging trends in carrier Ethernet for mobile backhaul, business connection, and consumer broadband aggregation, and equipment manufacturers have to like their approach of including data path protocols without additional cost.

Architected for wire speed 10 Gb bandwidth using inexpensive DDR memory, this new family of devices has up to 14 on-chip engines: 12 in the data path, 1 MIPS core in the control path, and 1 MIPS core for either the control path or the data path. It provides the requisite Carrier Ethernet interfaces: dual 10 Gb ethernet ports, up to 8 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports, 16 1 Gb ports, or 72 100 Mb connections. It has integrated SERDES for XAUI, SGMII and 2.5Gb SGMII connectivity. The dual MIPS 34K cores can run up to 650 MHz and the device may be connected to stand-alone external processors as well thru PCI express.

WinIP3 is the most advanced most highly-integrated IP/MPLS processor available today, said Robert O’Dell, executive vice president of marketing and sales for Wintegra. It has superb cost and performance, the right mix of I/O, and leverages Wintegra’s large installed base of production ready software.

The company’s new WinIP3 will be first available in the third quarter of 2009. Volume pricing starts at less than $50.