VDSL is the most powerful member of the xDSL family, capable of providing up to 50 Mbps on a single telephone wire. It provides unmatched flexibility in rate, reach and symmetry to satisfy the increasing demand for high-speed services such as corporate communications, fast Internet access and high quality digital audio and video delivery.

This presentation will provide an introduction to the VDSL technology and its applications. It will give an overview of a VDSL system, describing channel conditions, system architecture, and VDSL performance in terms of rate-reach-symmetry objectives. It will cover the basic principles of VDSL, explaining why VDSL is not just an upgrade of ADSL in terms of higher transmission speed, and summarizing the features in the current VDSL standard that allow customization and on-the-fly configuration of the modems. In the talk a general block diagram of a DMT-based VDSL modem will be presented, describing some of the signal processing techniques that enable this high performance operation and flexibility. Finally, some of the applications for VDSL such as ATM over DSL and Ethernet over DSL will also be described.

The talk will be given Dr. Fernando Ramirez-Mireles of Ikanos Communications. Dr. Ramirez-Mireles has over 8 years of experience in R&D for communications applications such as VDSL, ultra-wide band wireless communications and speech processing. In the last 3 years he has worked in the DSL field, first in the strategic technology group of Aware Inc, a provider of intellectual property for DSL technology, and presently in the systems and algorithms groups of Ikanos Communications, a provider of silicon solutions for VDSL. He has authored twenty technical articles and has three patents pending. He is a senior member of the IEEE and received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

"VDSL at a Glance: Technology and Applications" presented by Dr. Fernando Ramirez-Mireles of Ikanos Communications.

Gigabit Ethernet - the result of a very successful technology hijacking from fiber channel by the IEEE802.3 committee, has given Bob Metcalfe's "Ethernet" a third generation of life. No longer limited to Local Area Network (LAN) applications within a building or a campus, it is evolving to be the ubiquitous technology spanning across the globe. The use of gigabit Ethernet in Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN), Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Wide Area Networks (WAN) presents a number of challenges for silicon, systems and optics designers.

Andy Moorwood and Nitin Bhandari of Extreme Networks will discuss these challenges and the novel solutions that have set the stage for "G4 Ethernet" - ten gigabit Ethernet.

Andy Moorwood is the Director of Advanced Development at Extreme Networks - a pioneer in the Gigabit Ethernet. Andy holds several patents in the data networking. He developed world's first IC's to support cascading of Ethernet hubs by "stacking" within a collision domain. Stackable network devices (now exploiting L2 and L3 techniques) are now widely deployed. He joined the nascent gigabit Ethernet start up "Extreme Networks" in 1996 and developed many system and IC designs for Extreme's stackable and chassis based layer 3 switches. Earlier Andy was with National Semiconductor in various engineering design and management positions.

Nitin received his MSEE from California Institute of Technology and BS in Electronics Engineering from University of Pune.

"Gigabit Ethernet - LAN, MAN, SAN and WAN applications" presented by Andy Moorwood and Nitin Bhandari of Extreme Networks.

The rapid growth of the Internet has resulted in an explosion in attacks on the computing and network infrastructure around the world. These attacks may be designed to use the computing resources or simply deny use of the computing resources by its rightful users. This has led to the emerging field of intrusion detection and prevention.

Of course the hackers are always working to stay ahead of these tools. It is a cat and mouse game. The challenge for the Intrusion Detection (ID) industry is to develop systems that can block intrusions in real time, before the network and computing resources are compromised. This needs to be accomplished without triggering false alarms from legitimate activities.

Ramesh Gupta is vice president of engineering at IntruVert Networks, a supplier of intrusion detection and prevention devices. Mr. Gupta leads the design team that conceived and developed the IntruShield product family. He has been active in the field of network and application security for over 10 years.

Before co-founding IntruVert, Mr. Gupta was director of network and Internet appliance engineering at Webvan, where he led the design of Webvan's data and voice network infrastructure and also ensured that emerging Internet appliances would be able to access the Webvan website. Earlier he worked at Hewlett-Packard for 14 years in planning, designing, and engineering HP's worldwide network infrastructure.

Mr. Gupta received his MSCS from University of Wisconsin and BSEE from the Indian Institute of Technology.

"Intrusion: Detection and Prevention" presented by Vimal Solanki of Intruvert Networks.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) are jointly and in parallel developing standards for voice processing applications. These standards are expected to accelerate deployment of voice processing applications by promoting inter-operability among different vendor applications.

VoiceXML (a recent W3C standard) strikes at the root of existing business models in the voice processing industry. Incumbents IVR and Speech recognition software vendors have embraced it and are reinventing their business models. With the clear victory of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the IP signaling standard, VoiceXML becomes even more important and relevant beyond the enhanced voice services industry. Another driver in the area of equipment and speech technologies is modularization of components in a converged network as clearly demonstrated by the Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP). This has led the IETF to develop Speech Services Control (SpeechSC) protocol to succeed MRCP as an IETF standard.

Mukesh Sundaram of Alcatel Genesys Labs will discuss these standards and their impact on voice processing product evolution.

"Voice Processing Standards" presented by Mukesh Sundaram of Alcatel Genesys Lab.

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are being deployed at a very rapid pace, but unless they are properly secured, they can be a gaping hole into your organization’s wired network. Mike Coop of Cranite Systems, Inc. will examine the state of the 802.11 security and discuss protection against various attacks. He will help you understand the Tower of Babel for different security initiatives – 802.1x, 802.11i, 802.11f, TKIP, WEP, WPA, LEAP, PEAP, EAP-TTLS, AES and FIPS-140.

This discussion will be of interest to everyone involved in deploying and supporting WLANs, as well as to those who have a general interest in wireless communications.

Mike Coop of Cranite Systems will review various wireless security initiatives and how that address different types of threats.

Mike Coop, Director of Consulting Engineering, joined Cranite Systems in February 2002. A 16-year high-tech veteran, Mike has held engineering, sales, and business development positions at a number of companies, including Microsoft and Cisco. He has extensive experience in enterprise and consumer networking markets and is currently responsible for Cranite's field consulting efforts.

An accomplished public speaker, Mike is best known in the industry for being the public face of Microsoft's WebTV Networks. Mike spends his spare time war driving. He has personally identified over 20,000 unique access points nationwide at the time of this writing. Mike is a member of IEEE and ISSA.

Today's successful businesses must learn to prosper with travel restrictions due to leaner budgets and now the threat of SARS. This requires utilizing new tools to communicate among multiple offices often scattered across different time zones. Businesses are discovering the benefits of highly interactive "virtual" communication to collaborate with employees, partners, suppliers and customers. The term "Virtual Collaboration" refers to the concept of "meeting" not in person, but by using various media and tools to work together even though they are in different locations.

What tools and media are easily available to aid virtual meetings, web based training and presentations? How many companies are adopting this type of strategy to reduce travel budgets and avoid sending their stakeholders on the road while increasing efficiency and effectiveness?

Web conferencing, video conferencing and teleconferencing are among the technologies and solutions that will be discussed by Bhaskar Roy, senior channel & partner marketing manager for PlaceWare, Inc., a Microsoft company. Examples will be offered of companies' best practices and successes using tools that dramatically increase productivity while significantly reducing both time away from the office and travel expenses.

Bhaskar Roy is the Senior Manager for Channel & Partner Marketing at PlaceWare. PlaceWare is a leading provider of web conferencing services to enterprises with approximately $50M in revenues for 2002. It was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year.

Mr. Roy has been on the frontlines of the virtual communications and collaboration industry. At PlaceWare he has developed strategies for developing new markets and built relationships with many companies including Cisco, Bea and Oracle. He will share his experiences and expertise in this new emerging field.

Mr. Roy received his MBA from the University of Phoenix and Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology.

While the world's data transmission capacities are growing at an enormous rate, relatively few users have broadband access to them. Wired solutions, including fiber, cable modems, and digital subscriber lines, have limitations that prevent ubiquitous deployment. Broadband wireless access (BWA) is an alternative that offers quick build-out at a low cost. A key issue for the success of these systems is global standardization. Within the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee, the 802.16 Working Group on Broadband Wireless Access, with hundreds of participants worldwide, has completed the Wireless MAN air interface standard for fixed wireless metropolitan area networks operating from 2-66 GHz. With this work completed, 802.16 has been chartered to extend its standard to address mobile terminals as well. This talk provides an overview of the 802.16 technology, which is based on a QoS-oriented point-to-multipoint medium access control (MAC) layer with an optional mesh topology and both single-carrier and OFDM physical layers.

Roger B. Marks is with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. In 1998, he initiated the effort that led to the formation of the IEEE 802.16 Working Group on Broadband Wireless Access, chairing it since inception and serving as Technical Editor of IEEE Standards 802.16 and 802.16.2. He also serves actively on the IEEE 802 Executive Committee.

Marks received his A.B. in Physics in 1980 from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in Applied Physics in 1988 from Yale University. Author of over 80 publications, his awards include the 2003 Individual Governmental Vision Award from the Wireless Communications Association and a 1995 IEEE Technical Field Award. He developed the IEEE Radio and Wireless Conference and chaired it from 1996 through 1999. A Fellow of the IEEE, he has served as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer since 1999.

Enterprise Network Management (ENM) is the process of establishing, monitoring and maintaining IT assets distributed across the enterprise networks - many Local Area Networks (LANs) inter-connected across a global Wide Area Network (WAN). As companies become more dependent upon their IT infrastructure and the infrastructure itself becomes increasingly complex, corporate IT managers require desktop and server management tools to keep track of IT assets and automate dissemination of software quickly and efficiently throughout the enterprise.

'CHANGE' is the one thing that is a constant in any IT environment. The ongoing pressure on IT budgets has led IT departments to focus on total cost of ownership (TCO). Effective Change Management is a key component in reducing TCO while improving availability of IT resources.

Mr. Kathpalia will describe the tools needed to manage IT assets from a central location.

Shiv R. Kathpalia is Director of Engineering at LSVI responsible for software development and customer support. He is an industry veteran with more than 28 years of experience in design and implementation of communications systems and network/systems management software. Before joining LSVI in 1995, he was at Bank of America for 5 years, where his team won the Computer World award for best Object Oriented Network Management application, in 1993. He started his career at DCM Data Products (India) in 1974.

Shiv received his BS in EE from Indian Institute of Technology (India) in 1974.

Over the last few years the FCC has opened up more than 12 Gigahertz of spectrum for unlicensed use for communications application. This enormous amount of new spectra dwarfs all the existing unlicensed allocations by more than an order of magnitude. However, to commercially exploit these allocations requires fundamental changes in the way that we design our radios as well as the way that we use CMOS technology.

The Ultra Wideband 3-10 GHz band, requires a complete re-thinking of how a radio should be designed, since the most natural representation is in the time domain as opposed to the frequency domain approach of essentially all past radio systems. The restrictive power levels that are required in this band will require enormous amounts of computation that can be accomplished at low power and low cost if the right CMOS computational architectures are used.

The 5 GHz of unlicensed bandwidth around 60 GHz doesn't have such restrictive power limitations, however the use of CMOS at these microwave frequencies requires a new methodology for CMOS implementation. While the fundamental performance of CMOS in present day technology allows the integration of 60 GHz radios, to efficiently exploit this new opportunity using standard digital CMOS technology, will require new device models, design methodology and system designs.

Professor Bob Brodersen received his PhD from MIT in 1972 and then was with the Central Research Laboratory at Texas Instruments for three years. He joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 where he is now the John Whinnery Chair professor and Co-Scientific Director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center.

Professor Brodersen's research is focused in the areas of low power design and wireless communications and the CAD tools necessary to support these activities. In 1982 he became a Fellow of the IEEE and was co-recipient of the IEEE Morris K. Liebmann Award for Outstanding Emerging Technology in 1983.

Professor Brodersen was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1988. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund, Sweden in 1999. He has received numerous awards from all over the world for his accomplishments. Some of the recent awards include the Millennium Award from the Circuits and Systems Society and the Golden Jubilee Award from the IEEE in 2000, the Lewis Winner Award for outstanding paper in the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in 2001.

Despite the recent economic downturn, research in optical communications technologies continues to progress at an unprecedented rate. Significant advances have been made in demonstrating a large no. of DWDM channels at 40 Gb/s or higher data rates, and high capacity (e.g. 1000 x 1000-port) optical cross-connects with low insertion losses. Great strides have also been made in combating chromatic and polarization dispersion adaptively over long distances.

Considerable R&D and standardization efforts are is needed to transform the experimental results into cost-effective and deployable solutions. Dr. Cheung will review some of the trends in transmission and switching technologies, and examine how they impact the practical implementation of the core, metro and access optical networks. He will illustrate such trends by using examples from the following 3 areas:

1. Emerging protocols for adapting data networking formats more efficiently in the carriers' SONET/SDH infrastructure;
2. Tunable lasers, filters and receivers;
3. Optical packet and burst mode switching.

He will then discuss some of the network control and management issues and review recent demonstrations in internetworking and interoperability.

Dr. Nim Cheung is a Telcordia Fellow and an Executive Consultant for Telcordia Technologies, a subsidiary of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He received his B.Sc. degree from University of Hong Kong and Ph.D. degree from California Institute of Technology. He was formerly Vice President of Applied Research Government Program in Telcordia Technologies and has held different research and management positions at AT&T Bell Labs, Bellcore and Telcordia in optical networking and network management.

Dr. Cheung has conceived and helped create many gigabit and optical networking test beds sponsored by the U.S. Government. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a recipient of the Bellcore Award of Excellence. He has held numerous leadership positions in the IEEE Communications Society, serving as Vice President of Technical Affairs from 1996-97 and is currently Chair of the Emerging Technologies Committee and a Distinguished Lecturer of the Society.

Signals are everywhere - in our cars, in our homes, in the air around us, and even in our bodies. Without signals, we wouldn't be able to move our fingers, hear our favorite songs on the radio, watch television, or talk on our mobile phones. Some signals are natural - like our nerve impulses - but many are man-made. Ever since the invention of telephone and radio transmitters, engineers have been working on processing signals. For years they have been trying to make music sound more life-like, to make the same wires carry more telephone conversations, and to make it possible for doctors to look inside our bodies without inconveniencing us.

Today, with the availability of powerful inexpensive microprocessors, more and more signal processing can be included in just about any product. Thus, we've seen the CD revolutionize music reproduction and the DVD play a similar role in video. You can now take photos without film, remove red-eye right on your laptop, and e-mail them to your friends without paying for duplicate prints.

So, what is Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and how can it do all these things? John Zarrella will explain the basics of a DSP without getting into the mathematics of signal processing. You'll learn:

• What signal processing is all about
• Why DSP is so powerful
• How semiconductor advances have made DSP ubiquitous in many products today
• The difference between analog and digital signals
• How signals are sampled and converted
• How DSP is used in important applications such as music and video

This course is specifically designed for professionals who know little or nothing about Digital Signal Processing. If you're a manager, sales professional, software designer, or engineering undergraduate who'd like to learn how DSP is invading almost all areas of electronic design, you owe it to yourself to attend.

Back by popular demand, Mr. Zarrella (President, Impressima Inc.) conducted the highly popular programming language seminar last year. He is back to explain the basics of Digital Signal Processing.

Mr. Zarrella earned his B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Carnegie-Mellon University. He has designed hardware and software systems for many industrial applications including transportation, instrumentation, wireless and process control. John designed software for one of the early DSP processors - the Zoran ZR34161 Vector Signal Processor. Before founding Impressima, John was in charge of the OEM Systems and Peripherals Group at Intel Corporation.

The seminar presented by the IEEE Communications Society Oakland-East Bay chapter is open to all technical professionals. If you are a user of DSPs or are thinking about using DSPs or are simply curious, then this is a MUST ATTEND event for you.