SAN FRANCISCO — The telecom industry is quickly evolving from "POTS" (plain old telephone services) to "PANS" (pretty awesome new services), according George Heilmeier, chairman emeritus of Bellcore (Morristown, N.J.), in his keynote address at the 35th Design Automation Conference.

Heilmeier, a former director of Darpa, one-time chief technology officer of Texas Instruments Inc., and a pioneer of the liquid crystal display (LCD), talked about transitions in telecom and predicted what the network of the future is going to look like.

Today's telecom industry is facing three major forcing factors, Heilmeier said: technology, customer-related trends, and cost-related trends.

According to Heilmeier, the recent convergence of the telecom and computer industries gave rise to deregulation, which in turn created competition, and ultimately placed a premium on time-to-market and enterprise efficiency.

"When I first came to Bellcore from Texas Instruments, I asked how we began to understand what our customers really wanted," said Heilmeier. "I was rapidly told, 'Look, the telecom industry isn't like Burger King; you don't get it your way — you get it our way or you don't get it at all.' Over the last few years, things have changed."

Customers today expect concierge-like service, and their demands — rather than requests — drive technology, Heilmeier said. And if they don't get what they want, they move to the competition.

In this environment, competition and customer demands gave rise to concern over cost-related issues such as down time and problems with system interoperability.

Heilmeier said that the three factors he identified are driving the industry away from the current switching-circuit networks to more up-to-date solutions.

The networks of today will be replaced by multi-purpose systems with Internet Protocol, Sonet and ATM, Heilmeier said. Network architectures will no longer be hierarchical, but will contain multiple access technologies and will incorporate dense wavelength permission multiplexing instead of copper and wire, he said.

These systems will require system-on-a-chip designs and system-level design tools, Heilmeier said.