Company Overview
Intersymbol Communications, Inc. develops high-speed optical receiver IC's for next generation long-haul and metro optical networks (OC192 and beyond). These products incorporate custom signal processing techniques, architectures and circuitry at optical data rates. The introduction of signal processing elements results in dramatically increased tolerance to signal dispersion and distortion as compared to conventional clock-data-recovery (CDR) optical receiver IC's. The impact for carriers and network providers is the ability to reduce the probability of network "outage", increased performance of existing optical links and deploy next generation networks with dramatically lower cost.

Our Initial Product:
Our initial product offering, the SmartCDR^TM is an equalization-enhanced receiver IC operating at 10GB/s that performs clock and data recovery in the presence of severe dispersion, both chromatic and polarization mode (PMD), fiber non-linearities such as four-wave mixing (FWM) and other system non-idealities such as spectral variance of the transmitter, and other effects of employing low-cost optics. To see a functional block diagram of the product click here.

Value Proposition to Customers
Intersymbol is targeting OEM's and transponder module manufacturers who sell optical metro area networking (MAN), long-haul (LH) and Ultra long-haul (ULH) equipment to carriers.

Our value proposition to the end customer in the MAN, LH and ULH markets is as follows:

• Upgrade "lower performance" or "dark" links to OC-192: With SmartCDR^TM PMD compensatory capability of >100ps, optical long-haul links containing older fiber (PMD.0.5ps/Ãkm) can be upgraded from 2.5Gb/s to 10Gb/s in a cost effective fashion.
• Increase fiber reach / regeneration spacing: 3R regeneration can cost up to 30% - 50% of the entire network cost and is necessary as the optical signals traveling down the fiber degrade beyond the detection capability of a standard CDR-based receiver. With a SmartCDR^TM receiver, signals can be sent over longer distances without requiring 3R regeneration thereby saving deployment costs in LH, ULH and Metro networks.
• Migrate OC-48 metro networks to OC-192: SmartCDR^TM provides the quickest and cheapest path for Metro network to be upgraded to 10GB/s without requiring major changes to the existing network infrastructure.
• Lower Metro transponder cost: The SmartCDR^TM receiver IC compensates for the dispersion caused by the use of low cost transmit and optical components, reducing overall transponder cost.