Editor: Linley
Gwennap In This Issue
A Guide to Gigabit and 10G Ethernet Silicon will be available soon. Get the latest information on the competitive GbE market. New in this edition is coverage of 10GbE products. For more information, visit our web site. Order by February 28 for a special discount. SiNett Unifies Wireless and Wired Switching This week, SiNett announced its first products, the OneEdge family of Ethernet switch chips. The OneEdge chips are the industry’s first merchant products designed specifically for unified switching, the term for a converged network that supports wireless LAN switching in addition to traditional wired Ethernet. SiNett’s goal is not to make dedicated WLAN switches cheaper but rather to help unified switching become cost effective. The startup’s CEO and CTO have a track record in Ethernet switching dating back to Maverick Networks, where the two developed what would become Broadcom’s highly successful StrataSwitch. SiNett’s flagship SN5024 is a 24xFE plus 4xGbE Layer 3 switch with integrated encryption engines and customer-programmable packet processors. On the switch side, the chip supports all the newest Layer 2 protocols as well as IPv4 forwarding but not IPv6 forwarding. The SN5024 has enough encryption throughput for wire speed L2 (802.11i) or L3 (IPSec) security using AES. A unified switch may need to perform L2 encryption when connecting a “thin” WLAN access point, while L3 VPNs provide an added layer of protection when using older WLAN security standards such as WEP or WPA. Although the switch side of the SN5024 handles Ethernet L2 and IPv4 L3 packet processing, the chip also includes four 32-bit MIPS cores. These CPUs use DMA to transfer packets into and out of the data path via four virtual switch ports. Together, the four CPUs deliver a healthy 1,000MIPS of peak processing power. In addition to the SN5024, SiNett will offer a 4xGbE version (SN6004) intended for WLAN appliance and service-card applications. Product samples along with a software developer’s kit are due in March 2005. The company has not disclosed other details such as power, package, or pricing. The OneEdge
products offer a unique level of integration and should deliver
a powerful combination
of features and performance. If SiNett can price the
SN5024 at a modest premium over 24+2 switch chips (e.g., $50),
the startup
should see strong interest from more than just WLAN-switch
designers. At Ethernet-switch prices, the flexible chip is likely
to find
its way into many applications that SiNett has not even
considered. —BW
RPR startup Cortina has acquired the assets of traffic-management startup Azanda, including its products, customers, and about 18 engineers. Azanda began life developing an OC-768 traffic manager, but when the higher-speed market failed to take off, it wisely retargeted to an OC-48 TM. Consuming more than $40 million in funding, Azanda had taken its TM chip to production and won designs at several Tier One customers, including Cisco. In many of these designs, Azanda's chip was used as a SAR between IP and ATM traffic. But revenue from these designs wins was delayed and ultimately failed to meet expectations. Founded in 4Q01, Cortina has raised more than $50 million and has a staff of around 65 employees. In 2004, Cortina qualified production on its RPR chipset, which includes an RPR MAC, Ethernet MAC, and serdes technology for connecting directly to an optical module. Cortina and Azanda shared a common set of customers, including Cisco. Although Cortina has generated some revenue, its design wins are not expected to enter volume production until later this year. Realizing a broad product line is needed for a viable supplier, several OEMs encouraged a merger between the two startups. The cost of the acquisition was not disclosed, but we expect it was less than $5 million. With the demise of Azanda, no startups remain that focus solely on traffic management. With a focus on the front end of a line card, Cortina plans to offer several new products later this year. Instead of a single product, Cortina can now offer a set of product lines that include SAR/TM, RPR MACs, and EoS products. With some existing vendors defocusing from framer/MAC components, Cortina has established a position to build a sustainable company. —JB More
coverage of Cortina and the RPR market appears in our report
A
Guide to Next-Generation Sonet Silicon. Last week, Chelsio announced second-generation 10GbE NIC and iSCSI HBA products. Based on the company's new Terminator 2 chip, the board-level products reduce cost and power dissipation compared with the prior generation. Chelsio is offering a 10GbE TOE NIC (T210) priced at $1,995 in volume and a 10GbE standard NIC (N210) priced at $1,295. New to the company's lineup is a 4xGbE TOE NIC (T204) priced at $895. Defending its first-to-market position in 10GbE TOE, Chelsio intends to halve the price of its NICs every 12 months. —BW Complete coverage of Chelsio's products appears in our new report A Guide to Gigabit and 10G Ethernet Silicon. This week, Sandburst announced that it had raised another $15 million funding, led by NeoCarta Ventures and including all earlier investors. The startup has now raised a total of $72 million. Sandburst offers a complete packet-switching solution, consisting of a network processor and a switch fabric with integrated traffic management. It has design wins at HP, Enterasys, and other major OEMs. The newest funding rewards its success in product development and in winning customers. —JB Complete coverage of Sandburst appears in our recent report A Guide to Network Processors and also A Guide to Switch Fabrics. Last week, Mindspeed upgraded the capabilities of its TSP3 traffic managers with a firmware release, called BroadbandMaker, targeting triple-play access applications. Building on the fine-grained traffic management capabilities of Mindspeed's TSP3 hardware, BroadbandMaker enables mixing of voice, video, and data in IP multicast bandwidth-expansion environments. Running BroadbandMaker, Mindspeed's M27481 traffic manager provides more than 2Gbps throughput for IP-to-ATM interworking, ATM cell switching, and IP multicasting while prioritizing delivery of real-time flows such as audio and video. —SI Complete
coverage of Mindspeed's traffic managers appears in our report
A Guide to Access Processors. Join us on April 27 when The Linley Group hosts a free* one-day seminar on Fabric and High-Speed Interconnects at the Double Tree Hotel in San Jose. The seminar will consist of a tutorial, presented by The Linley Group, and three sessions: Session I - covers advanced interconnects and fabric technologies, including Advanced Switching Interconnect and RapidIO. Session II - explores simple or board-level high-speed interconnects, including PCI Express, HyperTransport, XAUI, and SPI-4.2. Session III - discusses form factors used in networking and computing Each session will include technical and market experts from the industry. In just a short time, you can get up to speed on the latest developments and technologies in this fast-paced area. Following the seminar will be a reception with opportunities to network with these industry leaders, analysts, and your colleagues. *This seminar is free to qualified individuals who register by April 15. The seminar is targeted at OEMs, VARs, press, and the financial community. Visit our website for further details and registration information. Event sponsored by IDT, StarGen, Sandburst, and The Linley Group. Join industry analysts Linley Gwennap, CMP's Jim Turley, and BDTI's Jeff Bier at the Microprocessor Summit on Monday, March 7 at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. This new addition to the Embedded Systems Conference will focus on 32-bit processors, DSP chips, network processors, and other types of processors. Hear first-time announcements from ARM, Xilinx, Freescale and others. Special Offer: register for Microprocessor Summit by March 3 and pay only $295 for this one-day event ($995 value). Use priority code W123 http://www.esconline.com/sf/register
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