FPGA in Telecommunications

Essay for your tutor is it?

(How dare you?!...lol) No! I am really curious.

one application is in wavelength switching.

A routing label comes in on a common wavelength, followed by a packet on a designated wavelength. An FPGA decodes the routing label, looks up the destination, and sets an optical router so the packet goes to the right link. This requires the FPGA to respond while the packet is in flight, before it hits the optical switch.

Just guessing, but these days anything in the fixed infrastructure part o the network that used to be done in ASICs, which are now only viable fo the hand-sets.

One company I worked for is leading in voice recorder technology. In order to support a broad range of different telephone sets with the same hardware they use FPGAs. Every switch manufacturer uses a different proprietary protocol which needs to be dissected to retrieve audio and dialed numbers.

Nico Coesel schrieb:

I did a redesign once, where a bunch of ICs where completely replaced by one single, not even medium size FPGA. The boards was something like an A4 sheet, with two ASCIs, twos Altera FPGAs (Flex10K) and a Xilinx FPGA (XC2S30). This board was redesigned before, since some ICs went out of production. After this second (and last) redesign, ICs with a proce of ~400 Euro were replaces by a single 20 Euro FPGA, a Cyclone. ;-)

Regards Falk

Doing tasks. Sorry but its impossible to give better answers. I'm doing telecomunications and expect to have less in common with designs for othere companies. In fact I have several designs for one department that have nothing in common with designs for other departments in a rather small company. Imagine the widespread in companies covering a wide range of TC. Someone doing optical to electrical interface has complete different tasks like someone doing paket routing and both is complete different from a answering machine.

bye Thomas