Centillium Communications

One of the brightest people in the VoIP business has to be Faraj Aalaei the CEO of Centillium Communications, a leading silicon supplier to box makers and service providers worldwide. Aali is a Bell Labs alumni and isn’t bashful to tell me that his company is the only public corporation to be focusing on these areas. The company’s SOC or system on a Chip design lends itself well to high density apps. For example the Entropia III platform allows 1,000 channels to be carried on a single chip.

In case you aren’t aware, Japan is far ahead of the US in VoIP deployment and this market is dominated by Centillium’s products. The company is seeing more and more integration of VoIP into the various broadband access devices their customers sell. The company also sells complete systems with integrated routing and VoIP for ATA-like devices. These chips have full security built in allowing box vendors to quickly design and get product to market.

The Palladia chip for example supports ADSL a data rates of 50 Mbps with a WiFi and VoIP interface. Their chips can be used to allow CLECs to offer home users and business WiFi telephony phones.

Where does Aali see the future of communications going? Stereophonic and CD quality VoIP are two areas he thinks will be explored soon. As his company makes the chips that make these sorts of forward-thinking ideas possible, I am glad to see he is forward thinking as well.