SwitchCore Scores Design Win in Metropolitan Area Network Market

Business Wire, Jan 8, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

LUND, Sweden--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 8, 2001

SwitchCore AB (publ), developer of integrated switching devices for Internet and data communication, has received another volume production order. With these orders, SwitchCore will become one of the early suppliers of switches in the Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) optical market. In total, the potential revenue for these design wins is estimated to be SEK 100-150 million within two years.

"Our customers have started to move from sample orders for prototype designs to advance volume orders for production," says Nitish Amin, VP of Business Development and Sales at SwitchCore Corporation in San Jose. "The execution of this phase of our global business plan creates an opportunity for our customers to deliver advanced and profitable switching solutions to the market."

In the MAN market, there is tremendous demand to expand broadband capacity. Standards-based Ethernet, combined with existing metropolitan area optical fiber networks, promises to be a viable solution, offering a hierarchy of speeds, end-to-end protocol consistency, and technical features that are needed by both providers and users.

The metropolitan optical networking market, which deploys effective and robust services to the Internet, is estimated to be a major profit opportunity for SwitchCore devices. According to Point East Research, the market for metropolitan optical Ethernet is forecasted to reach $1 billion (US) in 2004.

"The CXE-technology has proven to be an excellent fit for the MAN optic products that our customers are developing," says Per Andersson, CEO of SwitchCore AB. "This is our second volume production order in the segment, and even if the total value of booked orders to date are the modest figure of SEK 3 million, I see that as an early player in this arena SwitchCore will have the potential to acquire a significant share in this growing broadband market."

SwitchCore AB (publ) was founded in 1997 around a three-year microelectronic research project at the Universities of Lund and Linkoping. The Company designs, develops, and markets integrated switching devices for selling to network equipment manufacturers and suppliers, worldwide. SwitchCore's CXE technology, where full-custom design methodology and high-speed CMOS are used, significantly increases the performance of switches and routers. The first product family was launched on the market in April 2000. The flagship product, the CXE-16 an integrated switching device, can switch up to 24 million packets per second. SwitchCore currently employs 85 people with offices in Lund, Stockholm, Gothenburg and San Jose, California. SwitchCore's stock is quoted on the OM Stockholm Exchange's O-list under the SCOR symbol.