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"What are you most excited about?" I asked Christian Wolff. He's now CEO of Lantiq after Infineon sold the division to investors Golden Gate. Wolff's an engineer, so I shouldn't have been surprised his answer was about the chips themselves, not the company challenges . He's designing in 65 nanometer, which requires less than half as much power for given functionality. Lantiq promises the chip complies with the most stringent requirements of European Union Code of Conduct (EU CoC) for energy consumption of broadband equipment. Small chips, Lantiq hopes, will stimulate innovative designs.
The first new chip, soon come, is the XWAY™ VRX200, 100 meg down with a Gigabit Switch fabric configurable as two Gigabit or four Fast Ethernet ports. It's designed to the preliminary 802.3az "Energy Efficient Ethernet" spec as well. When similar low power technology is applied to the DSLAM side, street cabinets will be able to eliminate the noisy fans and often be powered over existing copper pair for a big saving.
All 900 employees still have their jobs (hooray) as the company was already running lean. They are in good financial shape, with no debt.
No longer a huge company, Lantiq can move quickly as it did when buying the DSL design team of Aware. Wolff, Gohlke and team have proven they can survive in a tough market. Intel, Analog Devices, LSI Logic, ST Micro and even TI have exited DSL. Infineon/Lantiq is one of the survivors; they intend to do well.
This is the first story for a new company, so I normally wouldn't break unannounced news. Christian had told me they were doing some hiring, so I looked at the jobs on their website. They are looking for a senior development engineer for "Lantiq’s new GPON products."
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