WAYNE, N.J. Broadband chip designer Centillium Communications Inc. will take on Texas Instruments Inc. and Broadcom Corp. in the customer-premisess voice-over-Internet Protocol sector with the release this week of a VoIP-enabled DSL router chip and a standalone VoIP processor.
For years, Centillium's Entropia central-office chip has enabled the transport of VoIP traffic throughout a network. Now the company is chasing customer-premises equipment designs. "We now have the capability to address the CPE side," said vice president of marketing Martin Schenk.
The company is attacking CPE on two fronts. On one, Centillium has embedded its VoIP technology into its digital subscriber line CPE router chips to produce the Palladia 400 chip for residential gateway designs. On the other, the standalone Atlanta 100 chip will bring VoIP capabilities to a CPE product.
Palladia 400 is a two-chip solution based on Centillium's Palladia 220 chip set, launched a year ago. As in the earlier chip set, one IC in the Palladia 400 handles analog front-end and line driver operations and a second the baseband processing. "Eighty percent of the Palladia 400 is based on technology developed for the Palladia 220 chip set," Schenk said.
The biggest change between the 220 and 400 products comes in the baseband chip. To address VoIP processing, Centillium has added a 200-MHz digital signal-processing core and a hardware security block. The voice DSP block can process up to four compressed VoIP channels. The hardware security block, on the other hand, performs encryption tasks such as AES, 3DES, SHA-1 and MD5.
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