Freescale Semiconductor announced the introduction of its system-on-a-chip (SoC) for gigabit passive optical networks (GPON) today.

The SoC, developed jointly with Alcatel-Lucent, has been available to the access equipment vendor giant since some time last year and became available to other vendors some time early this year, Freescale said. It has also been deployed by some carriers overseas. Freescale waited until this week to publicly announce the product in order to learn from field trials first. “Now we feel it’s fully cooked and fairly mature—ready for prime time,” said Suhail Agani, the marketing manager for Freescale’s Digital Home division.

The news comes a week after Verizon Communications announced it would begin deploying Alcatel-Lucent’s GPON gear for commercial service in the second quarter. Freescale wouldn’t confirm that its chips would be used for those deployments. It did say it was targeting only two carrier customers in North America, where the SoC has thus far only seen trials. Because the current market is so small, Agani said, “We don’t see much point in making this a catalog product right now.”

By integrating more component functionality into silicon, SoCs are expected to improve the economics of optical network terminals (ONTs), the customer premises gear in fiber access networks that have produced notoriously thin margins for the companies that supply them.

PMC-Sierra and Broadlight have also introduced GPON SoCs overseas. But analysts have predicted their arrival in North America wouldn’t take place until late 2007 or early 2008.

Freescale’s SoC, the MSC7120, features an integrated central processing unit and a digital signal processor for converting up to four channels of voice traffic from analog to digital. It also includes a hardware-based packet forwarding engine that forwards packets at a line rate of 1 Gb/s.