HARDWARE 030527

Edgewater Announces New Family of Edge Devices
Edgewater Networks Inc., a maker of access products, announced a new family of edge devices, the EdgeMarc 30, EdgeMarc 300 and EdgeMarc 300T, priced at $995, $2900 and $3500, respectively. Each product includes a voice-over-IP proxy server that supports is SIP, MGCP and H.323 signaling, a firewall that will pass IP voice packets, a DHCP server, network address translation (NAT), voice quality functions, and call-control and diagnostic features. The product series, designed to serve as the demarcation point between wide-area networks (WANs) and local-area networks (LANs), can be managed remotely.

TI Launches New VoIP System on a Chip
Another system on a chip for IP voice has been introduced, this time from Texas Instruments. The TNETV1050 IP phone processor is based on the TMS320C55x processor, which has DSP capability and a MIPS 32 RISC core. It includes a dual-channel, 16-bit audio codec (to support handset, headset and speaker drivers) and an Ethernet subsystem that supports three Ethernet ports. The chip can be used with TI's TPS2370 power interface switch, which is compliant with the 802.3af standard, to support power over Ethernet (PoE). The chip includes the TI VLYNQ chip-to-chip serial interface, so manufacturers can add coprocessors and peripherals for additional capabilities. In general the more functions that can be integrated on one chip, the lower the cost and the more efficient the operation in terms of chip speed.