EE Times - August 6, 2007 - (Page 1) www.eetimes.com Monday, August 6, 2007 The industry newsweekly for the creators of technology P ISSUE 1487 Inside Router goes with the flow New design attacks Internet bottlenecks, but faces market battle vs. legacy options By Rick Merritt Playing to an engineer’s heart Teardowns of ICs and systems have moved from backroom Skunk Works to a critical part of a firm’s “business intelligence.” Semiconductor Insights, now part of CMP Technology, has carved out a niche by reverseengineering ICs. p.6 San Jose, Calif. — A router design that promises to change the way traffic is handled on the Internet has been announced by the Internet pioneer Lawrence Roberts. People familiar with the new Flow Router said Roberts’ system is a novel and promising approach to a well-known problem, but his startup, Anagran Inc. (Redwood City, Calif.), faces hurdles gaining market traction for it. Today’s routers generally handle traffic as individual packets of data. Many add-on systems are emerging that try to understand and manage larger groups of related packets, called flows, that could be part of the same voice call or video stream. Routing traffic at the level of flows is the right approach for today’s Net, where video and voice are becoming increasingly important, said Roberts, who led the design of a government packet network that became the basis for the Internet. “We would have liked to manage traffic as flows from the beginning because it is only natural to treat video, images and voice calls as Another stab at data transport Cisco cofounder Len Bosack’s company unveils an opticaltransport system, DXM, that combines DWDM with simplified Internet Protocol mapping. p.8 one object, but we didn’t have enough memory or processing power,” said Roberts, who also wrote one of the first e-mail applications. “Now memory is cheap as mud.” Roberts tried a similar approach with Caspian Networks, a startup he left in 2004 that closed its doors in 2006 after having raised a whopping $300 million in venture capital. Caspian had the right idea but came a little early and hit the tech downturn hard, Roberts said. “The economics of this idea were just starting to come into being, but the system at that time was 10 times the cost and size of what we built today, so Caspian went out of business because they didn’t have enough profit margin,” Roberts said. Anagran’s FR-1000 costs $70,000, about a third the price of traditional routers, yet promises utilization rates as high as 95 percent compared with rates as low as 25 percent for some packet routers. “You can get a significant performance increase by just dropping these into existing networks,” he said. In addition, the FR-1000 fits into a 1U slice of a standard 19-inch rack, compared with traditional devices as big as 13U. It dissipates 300 W, compared with as much as 4,000 W for some packet routers. “This really is the router of the future,” Roberts said. The International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University has been testing the Anagran system for several months. The center’s director, Joe Mambretti, said, “It’s a very promising technology and has significant potential, addressing a number of issues in a way no one >> 8 MEMS launches software-defined radios in space By R. Colin Johnson The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has begun a program to develop MEMS technologies that reduce the size, weight and power of its radio transceivers. Of particular concern to NASA is miniaturizing the radios for its space-constrained extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) known as “space walks.” NASA proposes that industrial partners begin developing reconfigurable multiband MEMS chips that can be inserted into future frequency-agile software-defined radios. The exploration of space imposes daunting specification goals on component suppliers—demanding a combination of small size, light weight, low power, radiation immunity, vibration tolerance and extreme longevity. Luckily, those specifications read almost like a definition of microelectromechanical systems, putting MEMS in space from the earliest Shuttle launches. “I would be surprised if there was a single Shuttle launch that did not have one of our MEMS devices on board,” said Harvey Weinberg Sr., applications engineer at Analog Devices Inc. (Waltham, Mass.). The market for any space application is naturally small, since relatively few spacecraft are launched annually, and the market for MEMS in space is no exception. On the other hand, NASA has often pioneered areas that trickle down to the military and commer- >> 10 The SiTime resonator used in the company’s MEMS oscillator chip is being readied for space applications. Perceiving an object’s shape The future of haptic computer interfaces and graphics is on display at Siggraph. Among the projects is a 3-D stereoscopic display that renders and projects images at 5,000 frames/s. p.15 http://www.eetimes.com
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