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Networking Silicon Market Share 2005 provides the latest data on revenue and market-share estimates for wired communications ASSPs. The report is available now for immediate delivery. For more information, visit our web site. Solarflare Obtains NIC Capability This week, Solarflare and Level 5 announced an agreement to merge the operations of the two companies. The combined companies will continue under the Solarflare name and the Solarflare management team, including CEO Russell Stern. The merger combines about 50 employees from each company. Although Stern would not disclose the exact amount, Solarflare raised additional venture funding in support of this merger. The new Solarflare has a cash balance of $50 million, which should be sufficient for the company to deliver its 10Gbps Ethernet products. Founded in 2001, Solarflare is the leading developer of Ethernet PHYs for the 10GBase-T standard or 10Gbps Ethernet over copper. The company should be the first vendor to sample a 10GBase-T PHY. These initial PHYs, however, are multichip products dissipating 10W or more. Solarflare is likely to need another generation before its PHY solution is attractive for NIC applications. Founded in 2002, Level 5 develops advanced Ethernet controllers. The company is shipping a 2xGbE NIC with PCI-X 1.0 host interface and is developing a 10Gbps Ethernet controller. Level 5’s solution is unique in having a TCP/IP software stack for each application space. This approach bypasses the OS to eliminate context switching, resulting in lower CPU utilizations and latency as compared with a typical GbE controller. Proprietary TCP/IP stacks, however, have had limited acceptance by end users, as evidenced by Ammasso’s exit. Solarflare may have better success by reapplying Level 5’s technology to Microsoft Chimney implementations. By adding Level 5’s controller to its PHY, Solarflare can develop a complete NIC solution for servers, expanding its market opportunity. Whereas leading 10GbE NIC vendors rely on a third-party PHY, Solarflare can develop a more integrated NIC. The company, however, has stepped into a more competitive space, where it will face established vendors like Marvell and Broadcom instead of startups. —Jag Complete coverage of Solarflare appears in our forthcoming report A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects. This month, Cisco and startup Cortina Systems announced the availability of the Interlaken specification as a follow-on to SPI-4.2. Interlaken targets packet-processor connections at 20Gbps and greater data rates. Cortina and Cisco are providing a royalty-free license to this technology with the goal of creating a de-facto standard. Interlaken is a serdes-based interface, with each lane operating at data rates of up to 6.25Gbps. For better efficiency than XAUI and other interconnects, it uses 64b/67b coding. Interlaken stripes packets as eight-byte words across the number of lanes used in the application. Each lane uses a scrambler to randomize data for recovery at the receiver. If any lane fails, Interlaken will stripe across the remaining lanes. To provide redundancy without a reduction in performance, system designers can provision more lanes than necessary. Interlaken preserves the SPI-4.2 burst and packet-control conventions. A packet is divided into smaller bursts, delineated by a header. The bursts are striped as words, round robin, across the serdes lanes. Each burst contains a control word, which is used to indicate the start and end of a packet, for alignment, and to indicate idle messages. It also includes the burst control word, which is used for flow control messages and a 24-bit CRC. Interlaken uses two-state Xon/Xoff flow control (simplifying SPI4.2's three-state method) either in-band or out-of-band. With line cards and processors moving to 20Gbps, Interlaken solves a problem that is currently unaddressed in the market. Although Cisco has the volume to create a de-facto standard, the company has not stated its intent to adopt Interlaken broadly within Cisco. —Jag Complete
coverage of Cortina and Interlaken appears in our forthcoming
report A
Guide to High-Speed Interconnects.
For a fire-sale price of $5.8 million, Tundra this week picked up a unit of Alliance Semiconductor that develops bridge chips. From a previous acquisition, Alliance had a design team in India that was developing PCI Express (PCIe) bridge chips. Tundra will acquire this team as well as a handful of marketing and administrative personnel in California. In addition, Tundra adds short-term revenue of nearly $2 million per quarter from Alliance's existing HyperTransport and PCI bridges. In 1Q06, Nasdaq took exception to Alliance's accounting practices, issuing a delisting notice to the company. Since then, Alliance replaced its CEO and has been looking to sell its business units. In this situation, Tundra saw a low-cost opportunity to enter the PCI Express bridge and switch market, complementing its existing PCI and RapidIO bridge chips. Tundra hopes to quickly integrate Alliance's engineers and develop a PCI Express product line. Tundra's PCIe product line, however, will be later than similar products from PLX, IDT, NEC, and Pericom. Tundra will need to develop an innovative solution to differentiate from these existing products. Thus, the company faces an uphill challenge to leverage this acquisition into a successful new PCIe product line. —Jag Complete
coverage of Tundra's bridge and switch products appears in
our forthcoming report A
Guide to High-Speed Interconnects.
Join us on June 14th for a Linley Tech seminar on High-Speed Interconnects and Fabrics. This event is designed to provide in-depth coverage of the latest advances in interconnects and how these may best be deployed in systems. The seminar will feature technical presentations from leading suppliers of products for interconnects and fabrics, including AMCC, Freescale, StarGen, PLX Technology, IDT, Tundra, Dune, and Pericom. Sessions will cover applications for bridges between interconnects, fan out switches, and fabrics over a backplane as well between systems. The sessions will feature case studies of interconnects used in various applications. Each session will review the type of interconnect technology used and what makes it suitable for the target application. Interconnects covered include PCI Express, RapidIO, Advanced Switching, Ethernet, and proprietary. The day will conclude with a panel discussing the longer-term trends in interconnects and fabrics. This Linley Tech seminar will be held at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose. Regular admission is $495, but is free to qualified individuals who register by June 9. The seminar is targeted at OEMs, board developers, software developers, press, and the financial community. Register today Sponsored by Freescale, AMCC, StarGen, Tundra, PLX, IDT,
Dune, Pericom, and The Linley Group.
Security functions are no longer confined to just firewalls and VPN units; the scope of applications continues to expand encompassing IP storage, wireless networks, secure VoIP, L4-7 switches, and servers. The growth in e-commerce is driving an explosion in secure web traffic as consumers need to securely transmit credit-card numbers and other personal information. Corporations are turning to virtual private networks (VPNs) to eliminate expensive leased lines and to safely access sensitive data from remote offices and even employees' homes. The explosive growth of wireless networks provides another valuable application for encryption, to keep sensitive data from the prying eyes of hackers armed with wireless laptops. To meet this need, network equipment vendors are incorporating security into their entire product lines rather than segregating it in separate VPN boxes. But in most of this equipment, the bandwidth demands overwhelm the ability of a standard CPU to perform secure encryption. These equipment vendors are turning to security processors to offload their routers and servers. After several years of rapid evolution, standalone security-processor performance has leveled off. The market for multigigabit security has not grown as expected; at the low end, standalone security chips are being displaced by security functions embedded within communications processors. Yet, the need for security is greater than ever; instead of providing only encryption, today’s security appliances must examine content and protocol behavior all the way up to the application layer to provide adequate protection. Security processor vendors are finding that they must rise to the challenge of providing multilayer security. At the same time, several companies are now developing content-inspection solutions for XML and web services in addition to application-level security. A Guide to Security and Content Processors gives you the latest information on what's happening in this dynamic market. The report covers IPSec and SSL accelerators from market leaders Hifn, Broadcom, SafeNet, and Cavium, as well as processors that integrate high-throughput encryption, such as Cavium's Octeon, Raza's XLR, and Intel's IXP285x. In addition, the report examines vendors developing content-processing solutions, such as Tarari, Sensory Networks, NetLogic, and SafeNet. This new edition brings everything back into focus with up-to-the-minute coverage of the newest vendors and technologies. With one report, you can quickly compare these vendors and their products and choose the ones that best suit your needs. Order by May 26 to take advantage of the prepublication discount. For more information on this report, visit our web site. Did you know that The Linley Group now publishes a newsletter focused on semiconductors for consumer electronics? Here are headlines from the latest edition of Linley on CE. —Qualcomm
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