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Reminder: On March 13 we'll present a Linley Tech seminar on Metro Ethernet Equipment Design focused on Ethernet aggregation, Ethernet access, and Ethernet-over-Sonet/SDH equipment. Sponsored by: Freescale, AMCC, Xilinx, EZchip, Exar, Xelerated, Bay Microsystems, Lightstorm Networks, and The Linley Group. Last week, Cortina continued its shopping spree with the acquisition of Immenstar, a private fabless vendors of PON components, for an undisclosed amount. With this acquisition, Cortina adds another 40 engineers and an EPON product line. Founded in 3Q04 by Force 10 and Mahi Networks engineers and funded with about $5.5 million, Immenstar managed the amazing feat of developing an EPON chip set, called Mulan, for less than the cost of the Bionic Man. UTStarcom was an investor in Immenstar and designed Mulan into systems for Softbank Yahoo in Japan. After completing Mulan, Immenstar was working on a dual-mode EPON/GPON chip set, due to sample in 1Q07. Cortina's CEO, Amir Nayyerhabibi, is plugged into the venture community and can conjure large sums of capital with apparent ease. Over the past three years, Cortina has acquired Azanda, Intel's optical products, and now Immenstar—a strategy that sets the bulked-up Cortina apart from wimpier single-product-line startups. With the Azanda acquisition, Cortina consolidated its component business for Cisco's high-end routers. The acquisition from Intel more than quadrupled Cortina's revenue and gave the startup access to most major communication OEMs. Most of the product lines acquired from Intel, however, were addressing mature markets. Immenstar gives Cortina access to the fast-growing PON market. Cortina should be able to expose Immenstar's EPON products to more customers and add design wins. If Immenstar can deliver the dual-mode controller, Cortina will have the opportunity to sell GPON products in U.S. and European markets, expanding beyond the Asian EPON market. With the GPON market still in its infancy, Cortina's timing is good. Given the ease that Cortina raises capital, we would not be surprised to see the company add to its broadband play with the acquisition of small VDSL vendor. —Jag Complete
coverage of Immenstar appears in our recent report, A
Guide to Broadband Interface Chips This week, NetXen announced the availability of new Linux TCP offload software/firmware for its family of 10GbE NICs. Avoiding the term TOE, which seems to be a dirty word in the Linux community, NetXen calls its approach Linux Sockets Acceleration (LSA). In fact, NetXen's approach is different from conventional TOE implementations as it bypasses the Linux stack at the sockets layer. The major benefit of NetXen's scheme is that is does not require a kernel recompile but instead loads like a driver. This release fills out NetXen's stateful offload support, which already included a driver for Windows TCP Chimney. —Bob Additional coverage of NetXen appears in our report, A Guide to Gigabit and 10G Ethernet Chips. Last month, Freescale extended its PowerQuicc III line with the MPC8544. This device is very similar to other members of the MPC854x line, particularly the MPC8543, but the new version includes three PCI Express ports (each with up to four lanes) instead of one but drops support for RapidIO. At a list price of $91 for the 1GHz version, the new device is about the same price as the 8543. The company expects samples in 2Q07, with production by the end of the year. The 8544 increases the I/O options for the 8548 family, which offers strong performance per watt. With PCIe instead of RapidIO, the 8544 is better suited to enterprise applications, while other 854x parts address cellular base stations. —Linley Complete
coverage of Freescale's MPC854x family appears in our report
A Guide to High-Speed Embedded Processors.
Save the date! Mark your calendars for May 9 for a Linley Tech seminar on High-Speed Interconnects. This event will cover chip-to-chip and 10G Ethernet interconnects. Details on this event will be announced soon. Sponsored by: The Linley Group, Freescale, AMCC, and Altera. A Guide to Storage Processors brings you the very latest on storage-network and RAID processors as vendors of these processors upgrade their products to adapt to changes in storage technology. Vendors of iSCSI storage network processors are adding Ethernet interfaces to their chips, while companies strong in Fibre Channel are acquiring processing technology to enable them to address iSCSI demand while updating their FC offerings. Most RAID processor companies have integrated SAS/SATA interfaces, and many have added support for Galois Field arithmetic to support RAID 6 based on Reed-Solomon coding. The report covers RAID processors, storage network processors, SAS expanders, and iSCSI target HBAs. New in this edition is coverage of RAID processors, which include Intel's IOP34x "Sunrise Lake" family, LSI Logic's SAS1078, and the newest from AMCC, Emulex, and Vitesse. Storage network processors covered include the newest iVivity design, the iDisx 1000; Astute's new Athens processor; and the AV150 design that Emulex acquired from Aarohi. The report also covers the most recent developments at Aristos and iStor. SAS expanders covered include the newest designs from LSI Logic, PMC-Sierra, and Vitesse, which support zoning. We also cover iSCSI target HBAs, including the broad Chelsio line as well as QLogic's products. Order by March 16, 2007 to get a special prepublication discount. For more information on this new report, including a preliminary table of contents, visit our web site. To receive The Linley Wire via e-mail, click here
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