IDT announced plans to acquire ZettaCom, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California that developed a terabit-class hybrid switching fabric and companion OC-192 traffic manager silicon. The deal was valued at approximately $35 million in cash and is expected to close by the end of April.
ZettaCom will form the basis of a new serial switching division at IDT which will develop standards-based products based on Advanced Switching and PCI Express architectures. Daryn Lau, former ZettaCom CEO and president, will head up the new serial switching division as the vice president and general manager.
IDT said the acquisition would help accelerate the industry’s shift from proprietary to standards-based serial switching and bridging semiconductor solutions. The company is in the process of developing its technology and product roadmap and over time plans to add internal and external resources to strengthen the new division. The first series of products will be unveiled later this year.
Advanced Switching, originally spearheaded by Intel Corporation, is an emerging technology for chip-to-chip, blade-to-blade and backplane designs. Advanced Switching was created to overlay the core of PCI Express technology, adding transaction-layer capabilities to enable flexible protocol encapsulation, peer-to-peer transfers, dynamic reconfigurations, multicast as well as other capabilities. http://www.idt.comhttp://www.zettacom.com
- In July 2003, ZettaCom secured $19.2 million in its third round of funding. The round, jointly led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Investcorp, includes both existing and new corporate and financial investors. ZettaCom has raised $77.7 million since its inception in 1999.
- Advanced Switching is a switched interconnect and data fabric technology based on the PCI Express architecture for joining components and system boards in low-to-midrange communications and embedded applications. The PCI Express architecture, builds on the highly successful PCI standard, is designed as a general-purpose chip-to-chip interconnect technology. It uses the same physical and link layers as the PCI Express architecture. However, at the transaction layer, Advanced Switching is optimized to provide an array of specialized communications features, including high-availability functions, peer-to-peer and multicast networking, congestion and system management, scalability, and support for virtually any networking protocol. Intel said announced plans to adopt the proposed Advanced Switching specification into a wide array of its communication products, including network and storage processors, Ethernet controllers and chipsets that support embedded Intel architecture. Other companies active in this area include Agere Systems, Alcatel, Altera Corp., EMC Corp., Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi Ltd., Huawei Technologies, National Semiconductor, Nokia, Petalynx, OSE Systems, PMC-Sierra, Siemens AG, Sun Microsystems Inc., Synopsys Inc., TeraChip Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Vitesse Semiconductor Corp., and Xyratex.