CommsDesign Week in Review

8/23/2012 2:13 PM EDT

Calix is buying FTTH from Ericsson

We don’t know the amount of cash (or stock) changing hands in this deal, but Ericsson’s FTTH optical product line will now belong to Calix and Calix’s access equipment portfolio will be resold by Ericsson. Calix gets the global reseller channel; Ericsson puts more emphasis on 4G IP and mobile broadband. Sounds cozy. The deal should close in Q4 2012.

Call for Papers—Deadline coming up fast

Show us how smart you are! DesignCon, a show hosted by UBM, kicks off on January 28, 2013. It’s one of only a handful of opportunities in the year that engineers get to network on a large scale with other engineers on design and verification. Heavy emphasis is put on education and practicing-engineer peer-to-peer sharing throughout the event. We’re looking for technical papers, as well as papers for panels and tutorials, on leading-edge case studies, technology innovations, practical techniques, design tips, and application overviews.

The call for papers to be presented at DesignCon 2013 has been extended but only to August 27, 2012, so hurry. Learn more and submit a paper.

Automotive Ethernet Consortium

The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) launched the Automotive Ethernet Consortium to address stringent requirements of the automotive industry for next generation in-vehicle networking.  The OPEN Alliance (One-Pair Ether-Net) Special Interest Group (SIG) endorses UNH-IOL as the first laboratory to test BroadR-Reach, a standard that will achieve 100Mbps Ethernet connectivity in automotive networking applications.

Strong Ethernet switch growth

According to IDC’s Quarterly Enterprise Networks Tracker, worldwide Ethernet switch (Layer 2/3) revenues hit $5.5 billion in Q2 2012, hitting an 8.5% rate of growth year over year. Router growth was a mere 0.6% year over year during the same period.

Latin America’s Ethernet growth was an impressive increase of 17.0%, Asia/Pacific’s rate was 15.4%, and North America’s was a 5.9% increase. Europe, the Middle East and Africa region grew 5.2% during the same period—quite a surprise given the economic turmoil in the region. Gigabit Ethernet showed strength during the quarter with more than 55 million ports shipped while market revenues grew 6.5% over Q1.

What’s the market driver for such growth? Video traffic, of course. Imagine how good it would look if macroeconomic uncertainty weren’t such a reality.

Got wirelessly connected wearable device ideas?

Texas Instruments has joined the Wearable Technologies Innovation World Cup 2012. Categories are: Sports & Fitness, Healthcare ad Wellness, Gaming & Lifestyle, and Security & Protection.

The World Cup will focus on the best products, applications and ideas for Wearable Technologies. It’s TI’s third time as the Sponsor of the Innovation World Cup. What can you win? $5,000. Seems worth it. After all, you already have the idea, right?