A new semiconductor start-up launched today with chips designed specifically for carrier Ethernet, hailing a new era in cost reductions for carrier Ethernet technology.

Lightstorm Networks was founded in 2004 by two veterans of chip vendor Toucan Technology, which was acquired by PMC-Sierra in 2000. Bryan Campbell, CEO of Lightstorm, helped found Toucan, and Maurice Gleeson, the company’s chief technology officer, joined Toucan in 1994.

Lightstorm’s first product, the Brooklyn-10, is a 20 Gb/s carrier Ethernet switch-on-a-chip (10 Gb/s MAC and a 10 Gb/s framer). It was designed specifically to support carrier Ethernet applications such as virtual private LAN service (VPLS), provider backbone bridges and provider backbone transport (PBT) as well as new standards such as Connectivity Fault Management and those of the Metro Ethernet Forum, using application programming interfaces to support the desired applications. Each chip can handle 40,000 virtual LANs, 16,000 pseudowires or 128,000 MAC addresses. Lightstorm lists the Brooklyn-10’s “volume price” as $250 and its power consumption at less than 12 watts.

“We can switch and manage Ethernet traffic,” said Wade Appelman, vice president of sales and marketing for Lightstorm. “We can also support both the MPLS requirements that some customers have or the PBT requirements that customers may have. If a customer needs to support pseudowires, they can use the same exact product to implement that, using software to turn on PBT or pseudowire features.”

Interested equipment vendors are initially applying the Brooklyn-10 chiefly to optical transport applications, mapping Ethernet onto multiplexed optical wavelengths.

“Carriers are saying they want Ethernet interfaces directly in their Sonet or [wave-division multiplexing] transport boxes,” Appelman said. “They don’t want just Ethernet encapsulation. They want VPLS managed in the box itself. They want integration and the latest features in one platform: lower power consumption, lower cost, easier to manage.”

Lightstorm officials acknowledge that a PBT standard is in the very early stages of development and that its final version could differ from the implementation in the Brooklyn-10. “There’s the potential we’ll have to change our device in the future and in subsequent revisions to have some features that are part of the final standard,” Appelman said. “There’s always that risk. But we’ve seen a lot of new technologies come out, and the de facto standard often becomes the one that’s most widely deployed.”

In addition to BT, Nortel Networks has already racked up a few PBT deployment wins in North America.

By acting now, Lightstorm is hoping to get a jump on larger chip vendors that are more likely to wait for standards to develop. “Eventually bigger [chip vendors] will come in [to the purpose-built carrier Ethernet chip market] when the market is validated,” Appelman said. “But I think you’re talking one and a half to two years away.”

Whenever others follow suit, Lightstorm aims to catalyze a cost reduction in carrier Ethernet technology that benefits carriers.

“We designed this chip to offer all the services that are defined in the MEF, the PBT specification and the CFM specs,” Appelman said. “And because they’re not in the process architecture, they’re in fixed silicon; they’re always there. It’s very deterministic performance. At the same time, they’re using less power.”

Like Toucan, Lightstorm’s R&D is based in Ireland, while its U.S. office is in Waltham, Mass.