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A Guide to SOHO Gateway Processors is now available for immediate delivery. Get the latest information on the products and vendors powering the rapidly evolving residential and SOHO gateway market. For more information, visit our web site. PowerQuicc Targets Deep-Packet Apps At its Freescale Technology Forum, the company disclosed the architecture of its next-generation PowerQuicc III processor, the MPC8572. This chip will be the first PowerQuicc to include hardware for deep-packet inspection, supporting advanced applications such as intrusion prevention, virus scanning, load balancing, content switching, and multiservice routing. Due to sample in 1H07, the 8572 combines two e500 CPUs with encryption, reg-ex, and table-lookup hardware as well as integrated system peripherals. The 8572 will be Freescale’s first processor that includes technology from Seaway, an Ottawa startup that it acquired last year. Seaway had developed the reg-ex engine, used for pattern matching, and other content-processing technology. Ironically, the 8572 is also the first PowerQuicc to incorporate technology from its C-Port acquisition; the table-lookup unit comes from the network-processor family that Freescale shut down two years ago. The 8572 will not be the first dual-CPU PowerQuicc, but it is the first to combine two e500 CPUs. Because of the high power dissipation of the current dual-core 8641D, which uses the e600 CPU, we expect Freescale to focus on the power-efficient e500 CPU for future multicore processors, despite its slightly lower performance. The combination of two 1.5GHz CPUs with content-processing hardware should allow the 8572 to perform sophisticated applications such as unified threat management (UTM) at multigigabit speeds. By pulling together technology from various sources, Freescale can build a powerful upper-layer processor that will leverage PowerQuicc’s popularity in many networking applications. —Linley Complete coverage of PowerQuicc processors will appear in our forthcoming report A Guide to High-Speed Embedded Processors. Last week AMCC announced an agreement to acquire Quake Technologies for $69 million. Quake (Ottawa, Canada) is a startup developing 10Gbps PHY components for optical modules and line cards. The startup had raised about the same amount of funding as its acquisition price. AMCC plans to keep most of Quake’s 50 employees that are located either in Ottawa or in California. In September, AMCC will integrate Quake’s revenue, which should be at a run rate of about $5 million per quarter. With more than 400,000 ports shipped, Quake is the leading supplier of 10Gbps PHY components. After setting a strategic direction to expand AMCC’s product lines from telecom into enterprise networking, CEO Kambiz Hooshmand is beginning to build an Ethernet product line. Acquiring Quake will immediately establish AMCC as an early leader in 10Gbps Ethernet PHYs. Consequently, AMCC should gain a presence in Ethernet systems at Cisco, Foundry, Extreme, Enterasys and other leading OEMs. Quake along with other industry players are developing the SFP+ specification, which places the 10Gbps PHY on the line card and significantly reduces the cost of an optical module compared with the current Xenpak and X2 modules. In parallel, Quake has developed 10GBase-LRM technology, which will help lower the cost of 10GbE backbones. The IEEE should approve the 10GBase-LRM standard later this year. With limited resources and increasing competition from other startups like Aeluros, Quake needed more funds to expand its product line. Though fast growing, the 10Gbps Ethernet PHY market remains small in 2006. As a result, Quake had not reached profitability and would have been challenged to raise additional financing. The acquisition by AMCC provides Quake with the resources to develop a competitive roadmap and provides an exit for investors. As part of AMCC, the combined company should be able to expand its revenue and build next-generation products. With this acquisition, AMCC takes a big step in moving from its traditional markets into the rapidly growing 10Gbps Ethernet market. In order to build a sustainable Ethernet business, however, AMCC will need to expand beyond PHYs into other 10GbE building blocks. Over time, this is likely to put AMCC into direct competition with larger and entrenched Ethernet competitors like Broadcom and Marvell. —Jag Complete coverage of Quake appears in our report A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects. StarCore LLC, the joint venture among Agere, Freescale, and Infineon to develop DSP cores, is dissolving. The goals of these three investors for the company were to develop DSP cores and to make a business of licensing the cores and selling tools and support. While the company developed several processors, its failure to establish a successful licensing business precipitated the dissolution. Beyond the investors, StarCore signed few licensees, including Legerity, Skyworks, and Samsung. Even among the investors, only Freescale has put several StarCore-DSP-based standard products into mass production, basing both handset processors and high-end, multi-core DSPs for voice, mobile infrastructure, and other applications on StarCore DSPs. We expect Freescale to continue to develop the StarCore line and to coordinate with its erstwhile partners to mitigate fragmentation of the architecture. —Joe
Join us on September 21 for a Linley Tech seminar on designing security into networking systems. The seminar is designed to help system designers who are designing security systems or designing security into routers or other equipment. The program features technical presentations from leading suppliers of products for this market including SafeNet, Cavium, Hifn, Sensory Networks, Tarari, Freescale and AMCC. Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group, will begin the program with an overview of security technologies (e.g., VPN, DoS, firewall, IDS/IPS, antivirus) and where they are being deployed in the network. The remainder of the day will include talks and panel discussions covering a broad range of security-design topics including Layer 2 security, VPN, firewall, and content-inspection functions. We've lined up top technical speakers for the event, including Russ Dietz, CTO of Hifn; Steve Singer, System Engineering Manager at SafeNet; Dave Lapp, System Architect at Freescale; and Darren Williams, CTO of Sensory Networks. Regular admission is $495, but is free to qualified individuals who register by September 15. The seminar is targeted at system designers, OEMs, network-equipment vendors, service providers, security-software vendors, press, and the financial community. This Linley Tech seminar will be held at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose. Space is limited; register today to reserve your place. See our web site for further information. This event is sponsored by Freescale, AMCC, SafeNet, Cavium, Hifn, Sensory, Tarari, and The Linley Group.
The Ethernet market is marked by rapid technology transitions, which often result in large shifts in vendor share. In Ethernet switches, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) shipments are still growing quickly, displacing Fast Ethernet products. Despite strong competition from incumbent vendors Broadcom and Marvell, new vendors such as Agere and Vitesse are winning designs in this high-growth segment. In servers, the transition to GbE is already complete and we are seeing the first signs of 10G Ethernet (10GbE) adoption through adapter (NIC) shipments. In both of these segments, large vendors have acquired startups to fill holes in their solutions. With all of this new investment, the market for enterprise networking silicon is becoming increasingly competitive. A Guide to Gigabit and 10G Ethernet Chips breaks this market into five key segments:
The report delivers a complete chapter on six major vendors that offer products in multiple segments: Agere, Broadcom, Intel, Marvell, Realtek, and Vitesse. Each major-vendor chapter includes company background information, full details of announced products, a discussion of the vendor’s roadmap where available, and our conclusions about the vendor and its products. Then, for each product segment, we include a chapter covering other vendors and a chapter comparing the products in the segment. These chapters include coverage of switch chips from Fujitsu, Fulcrum, Greenfield Networks, and SwitchCore, as well as 10GbE NIC and iSCSI HBA products from Chelsio, Myricom, NetEffect, Neterion, NetXen, QLogic, Silverback, and others. Finally, we provide our outlook for the leading vendors in each segment and for the overall market. Unlike typical market research, this report provides technology analysis and head-to-head product comparisons. Which chips will win designs and why? How will these vendors be positioned as GbE and 10GbE continue to grow? Only The Linley Group’s unique technology analysis can provide this forward-looking view. Order by September 8 to take advantage of a special 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:
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