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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

April - 2007 - issue > Company Profile

Deploying ideas-Centillium way

Sriparna Chakraborty
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Sriparna Chakraborty
Rajat Sharma, a student of class nine, dreams of becoming a cricketer one day. He never misses his practice sessions over the Internet, as it gives him an opportunity to look beyond his studies once in a while. However, the high-speed broadband connectivity also contributes to keeping his hobby alive. Contributing silently to all this, is the technology that runs the connectivity done by Centillium Communications.

Centillium engages in design, development, and supply of system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions for broadband access infrastructure and various applications enabling broadband services. The SoC use digital and mixed-signal semiconductors, and related software for use in the digital subscriber line (DSL), voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), and Fiber-To-The-Premises (FTTP) markets. “We make innovative high performance cost effective semiconductor solutions for broadband access deployments,” says Faraj Aalaei, CEO of Centillium Communications.

Broadband has started to make its presence felt and is expected to grow to 400 million subscribers worldwide by 2010. There is proliferating demand from consumers for new capabilities in television entertainment, which includes interactivity, integration with voice and data communications, personalization and value-added services. Service providers are offering an answer to this burgeoning demand by ramping up their deployments, making solution providers like Centillium an ideal workplace for engineers.

“We drive broadband innovation till the periphery and helps customers to do more than they ever thought possible,” says Mohan C. S., Vice President and General Manager, Centillium. They increase DSL data rates to 50 Mbps, extending the reach of DSL services to 26,000 feet, or supporting more than 1,000 VoIP channels on a single chip. Centillium was the first company to introduce both 12 Mbps and 24 Mbps downstream data solutions and recently, they released the next generation Mustang 300 system-on-chip (SoC), expanding the company’s end-to-end fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) semiconductor portfolio. This highly integrated and low power FTTH solution, adds Mohan, is ideal for service providers deploying Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPON) in customer premise equipments.

These deployments have been made possible by their 300-engineer- workforce, which is involved in building applications from ground up. At the Bangalore center of Centillium, techies are involved in chores ranging from architectural to testing level. They move from broader specifications to the more detailed ones and help customers take the chip to the market quickly. “The India center,” adds Aalaei, “takes a different approach and enjoys end-to-end product development authority.” The components of software deployment are done here, validated and then find its way to the customers platter.


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