The Arsenal device comes three weeks after Madrid, a bridging chip to handle subchannels of resilient packet ring (RPR), and arrives a month ahead of an Ethernet channel-queuing chip called Barcelona.

Cortina is unifying its own chip sets with network-processing devices developed by Azanda Network Devices Inc., which it acquired earlier this year. The Arsenal chip interfaces gluelessly to Madrid as well as to Lisbon, an ATM part in production. Azanda's ATM segmentation solutions have been rebranded as Porto and Braga, and Cortina's quad 2.5-Gbit RPR solution is now known as Roma.

The company expects competition from framer vendors with traditional Ethernet expertise, including Ample Communications Inc., and from companies more versed in T1/T3 and Sonet framing, such as Agere Systems Inc. and PMC-Sierra Inc., said Fredrik Olsson, product manager at Cortina.

The vast array of Layer 2 and Layer 3 services demanded by carriers has pushed the need for programmable, inventoried line cards that can handle everything from native Ethernet to packet-over-Sonet, Olsson said.

Cortina's earlier Milan chip, a 10-Gbit RPR controller/framer, integrated the RPR controller with an OC-192 framer, Xaui interface, on-chip SRAM and multiplexer/

demultiplexers for optical transceivers. The Arsenal chip extends that concept by combining eight channels of services, each capable of interfacing directly to SFP optics, with multiple processors per channel.