Infineon to Develop Resilient Packet Ring Devices for Metropolitan Networks; Company Driving New Standardization to Extend Gigabit Ethernet into Metropolitan and Wide Area Networks

Jan 29, 2002 | Market News

San Jose, USA – Munich, Germany - January 29, 2002 – Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX), a leading provider of communications ICs and fiber optics components, today announced that it is developing devices incorporating OC-192 Resilient Packet Ring technology, a technology that is currently being standardized in the IEEE 802.17 committee and that will extend Gigabit Ethernet into Metropolitan and Wide Area Networks, paving the way for Gigabit Ethernet metro services. The new devices will augment Infineon’s recently announced industry leading 40Gbps high-speed framing, mapping, and mux/demux line card solutions.

Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) is gaining rapid momentum within the industry and will play a critical role in offering service providers the ability to create high-speed metropolitan networks that transport voice and data traffic efficiently while lowering both capital expense as well as ongoing operational expenses. RPR, a Layer Two media access control (MAC) technology, significantly increases the bandwidth efficiency of service provider networks by utilizing twice the capacity of traditional SONET/SDH rings. RPR delivers dynamic bandwidth management while preserving the same kind of protection and resiliency found in SONET/SDH networks.

In an effort to accelerate industry availability of RPR products, Infineon is licensing Cisco’s widely deployed Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP), a technology now used by over 190 service providers worldwide. SRP is a MAC-layer protocol for ring-based packet internetworking and is open and freely available as IETF Informational RFC 2892. Additionally, SRP has been submitted to the IEEE 802.17 Working Group. Cisco uses SRP in their Dynamic Packet Transport (DPT) products to deliver scalability, reliability, and simplicity to next-generation packet-based metro networks.

“Infineon, with its expertise in IC technology, will provide highly-integrated, low-power, small foot print devices for SRP and for emerging 802.17 RPR networks.” said Tony Bates, vice president, Internet Routing Group at Cisco Systems. “Infineon’s contribution to the RPR efforts will help further the rapid deployment of revenue generating Resilient Packet Ring networks by service providers.”

“This move reinforces Infineon’s commitment to provide complete, standards-based high-speed line card solutions for the optical networking market. RPR networks will enable service providers to combine the reliability of traditional SONET/SDH rings with the richness and scalability of data networks, and to eliminate critical bottlenecks in existing metro networks.“ said Gerhard Geiger, senior Vice President and General Manager of Infineon’s Communication Group. “We are excited to team with Cisco Systems to deliver time-to-market RPR solutions that benefit service providers.”

“Infineon is pleased to be developing industry leading IEEE 802.17 compliant RPR products for high speed Metropolitan Networks,“ said Christian Scherp, Vice President of Marketing of Infineon’s Optical Networking Business Unit. “Our goal is to deliver standards-based products to the optical networking industry, starting with these products that will be designed to enable a seamless integration of voice and data traffic.”

Infineon is an active member of the IEEE 802.17 committee and will work with other participants to drive RPR standards to speed up industry availability of standard compliant RPR products.

About Infineon


Infineon Technologies AG, Munich, Germany, offers semiconductor and system solutions for applications in the wired and wireless communications markets, for security systems and smartcards, for the automotive and industrial sectors, as well as memory products. With a global presence, Infineon operates in the US from San Jose, CA, in the Asia-Pacific region from Singapore and in Japan from Tokyo. In the fiscal year 2001 (ending September), the company achieved sales of Euro 5.67 billion with about 33,800 employees worldwide. Infineon is listed on the DAX index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: IFX). Further information is available at www.infineon.com.

Information Number

INFCOM200201.023e