Thumbing its nose twice over at Siemens AG, the company that is in process of becoming its 40% shareholder, GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd has announced plans for the next generation System X public telephone exchange, creating a direct competitor for Siemens’ EWSD switch, and has spurned the MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC chip – which Siemens is to fabricate for Europe – in favour of Motorola Inc’s 88000. Giving Motorola one of its biggest design wins yet for the 88000, GEC Plessey has announced that it is rewriting the software that runs on the GEC Mark II processor in the object-oriented C++ derivative of C for the 88000. The current version of the Mark II is a 32-bit machine built of Advanced Micro Devices Am2901 bit-slice microprocessors. The new generation System X – System X New Enhanced Architecture – is also planned to embrace the Stromberg-Carlson DCO built in the US and marketed as a rural exchange. The new exchanges will be modular, using vendor-independent standards where possible, and modules will be linked by a 100Mbps Fibre Distributed Data Interface fibre-optic local area network backplane. As well as supporting ISDN, it is being designed to become the core of the emerging Intelligent Network concept, which uses databases distributed throughout the network to implement and control switching and services It is also being designed to handle new switching modes such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode as well as the present time and space switching.
