Cisco to Acquire Memoir Systems for ASIC Design Expertise

Cisco agreed to acquire Memoir Systems, a start-up developing semiconductor memory intellectual property (IP) and tools that enable ASIC vendors to build programmable network switches with increasing speeds.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

Memoir Systems, which is based in Santa Clara, California with offices in Armenia and India, pioneered a new approach to develop new memories for switching ASICs.  The company claims its Algorithmic Memory innovations can increase the performance of existing memory macros by up to 10X more Memory Operations Per Second (MOPS). Its Renaissance family of products provides drop-in replacements for existing embedded memories.

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-memoirsystems/

http://www.memoir-systems.com/

• Memoir Systems was founded in 2009 by Sundar Iyer and Da Chuang. Iyer co-founded Nemo Systems, where he was the CTO and Principal Architect. Nemo (acquired by Cisco Systems in ’05), also specialized in memory algorithms. Chuang was a founding member of Abrizio Systems (a terabit switch fabric company acquired by PMC-Sierra in Aug ’99), and has past experience at both Nvidia and Adaptec. Prior to founding Memoir Systems, Chuang co-led the network memory group at Cisco Systems, where he helped architect and build multiple generations of high performance memory sub-systems for Cisco’s Enterprise and Data Center Ethernet products.