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NEW SEMINAR: The next Linley Tech seminar will be held on Wednesday, March 29 in San Jose. The topic will be High-End Switch/Router Design, featuring presentations on leading data-plane and control-plane solutions. Free admission to qualified attendees is provided by our sponsors AMCC, Freescale, EZchip, and Xilinx. For more information, access our web site. Last week, Broadcom announced plans to acquire Boston-area startup Sandburst. The deal is valued at about $80 million, with $75 million in cash going to Sandburst's current stockholders. Sandburst had raised $72 million in four rounds of funding from venture and strategic investors. For this relatively modest sum, Broadcom gets a production-quality chip set that includes a 10Gbps network processor and a 640Gbps switch fabric with integrated traffic management. Although Sandburst's current revenue stream is small, Broadcom will also receive design wins in strategic platforms at HP, Enterasys, and other major OEMs. Sandburst's existing design wins include Ethernet switches for both enterprise-core and metro applications. Sandburst's high-end fabric is highly complementary to Broadcom's market-leading StrataXGS GbE switch chips. For chassis designs, the Sandburst fabric acts as the central switch, while StrataXGS devices sit on line cards. In fact, Broadcom had already licensed its HiGig stacking interface to Sandburst for integration in future switch fabrics. For packet processing, however, there is overlap between Sandburst's programmable NPUs and Broadcom's fixed-function StrataXGS chips. The addition of a programmable architecture is important for Broadcom, as we expect most metro designs will favor flexibility over cost in the near term. Overall, this deal makes sense for all parties. Sandburst, which faced a slow revenue ramp and the prospect of further fund raising, gains instant credibility and resources. Sandburst's investors find an exit and avoid potential dilution. Broadcom fills out the high end of its Ethernet switching portfolio with a carrier-class product. For metro-Ethernet OEMs, this new combination presents a convincing alternative to internal ASIC development. —Bob Complete
coverage of Sandburst appears in our reports A
Guide to Network Processors and A Guide to Switch
Fabrics. On Monday, Cavium announced new dual-core and single-core MIPS processors in its Octeon line. The $125 CN3120 NSP includes all of the features of other Octeon NSP processors, including security, compression, and content-inspection engines. The CN31xx family, which is due to sample this quarter, also includes single-core versions priced as low as $49. To reach prices as low as $19, Cavium will offer the CN30xx family, which excludes the content-inspection engines and associated memory interfaces. Furthermore, the CN30xx chips use narrower main-memory interfaces and integrate a smaller L2 cache. With a 16-bit DDR2 SDRAM interface and 64KB L2 cache, the low-end CN3005 fits in a BGA-350 and dissipates only about 3W. The CN30xx family is due to sample in 2Q06. Although these new processors are straightforward derivatives of Cavium's original 16-core Octeon design, they are significant from a price/performance perspective. At $125 or less, the CN31xx NSP chips set a new price point for hardware acceleration of content inspection. These chips should be particularly attractive for enterprise-class unified threat management (UTM) appliances. The CN30xx chips hit SOHO price points, filling the gap between existing Octeon processors and Cavium's Nitrox SOHO line. With these additions, Cavium now unquestionably offers the broadest line of processors for security applications. —Bob Complete
coverage of Octeon appears in our report A Guide
to Security and Content Processors.
NetLogic's agreement to acquire Cypress's search-engine products injects new technology into NetLogic and eliminates a major competitor. The agreement, announced last week, covers Cypress's Sahasra, an algorithmic search engine, and Ayama/70K, traditional TCAM products. NetLogic agreed to pay $50 million in its common stock and an additional $20 million if certain revenue targets are achieved within a year. Essentially, this boils down to $50 million for the Sahasra technology and up to $20 million for the revenue stream from the TCAM products. Although Cypress originally wanted to spin out its entire search-engine business to a private equity firm, the company's largest TCAM customer (Cisco) preferred to keep Cypress as its supplier instead of an unknown vendor. Consequently, Cypress and NetLogic came up with a new option, whereby Cypress continues to supply current-generation products to Cisco but NetLogic picks up all of the non-Cisco business. In addition, NetLogic gets Cypress's next-generation products, including Sahasra, and Cypress cashes in for $50 million. NetLogic gets to add immediate revenue and a customer base
from the acquired TCAM product lines. NetLogic, however,
must figure out how to position its
own TCAM chips with these acquired TCAM product lines to win new designs.
In the
long term, the company must consolidate its TCAM roadmap and show a migration
path. IP SEMINAR SLIDES AVAILABLE: If you missed our recent Linley Tech seminar on CPU Cores and Intellectual Property for Networking and Communications, you can download the presentations from our web site at no cost. This seminar featured presentations from The Linley Group as well as leading CPU-core vendors ARC, Tensilica, MIPS, and Freescale. The afternoon session included presentations on IP cores from SafeNet, Rambus, GDA Technologies, and Mentor. We would like to thank our event sponsors: Freescale, SafeNet, Tensilica, and ARC. SEE Linley ANALYST SPEAK: Jag Bolaria, senior analyst of The Linley Group, will keynote the upcoming Synopsys seminar on Thursday, February 16 in Santa Clara. The seminar topic is "Strategies for Integrating Connectivity IP into Your SoCs," and Jag's talk will address trends in high-speed interconnect. For more information about this event, access the Synopsys web site. To receive The Linley Wire via e-mail, click here
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