commsdesign.com
SAN FRANCISCO — National Semiconductor Corp. and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. will collaboration on the development of enterprise-strength Gigabit Ethernet ICs, including media-access controllers (MACs), physical interface controllers (PHYs) and Gigabit Ethernet switches. National will manufacture the parts at its 0.18-micron CMOS facility in South Portland, Maine, and each company will handle its own marketing.
The partnership will renew National's strength in the Ethernet chip market, where it held a leading position through much of the 1990s, said Mike Noonen, vice president of the Wired Communication Division at National (Santa Clara, Calif.). Only in recent years have younger companies like Broadcom Corp. and Marvell Semiconductor Inc. seized manufacturing and development leadership, he said. National's partnership with Vitesse (Camarillo, Calif.) is intended to bolster its position in the Ethernet chip market projected to be worth $13 billion this year and growing to $20 billion by 2004, according to iSupply Corp.
National had previously entered a partnership with iReady Corp. (Santa Clara) to develop integrated transport offload ICs for the storage-area network market. Like Gigabit Ethernet, those devices depend on rapid TCP/IP protocol dissection. And like Gigabit Ethernet routers, datapath offload devices are designed to minimize host CPU cycles for storage-area networks using Gigabit Ethernet protocols and iSCSI physical transport layers.
National made a $19 million equity investment in iReady as part of its partnership with the startup.
No financial terms of the National-Vitesse agreement were announced. The first product of the relationship — a 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and reference design — is expected to be released next week. |
