ASIC to spear Prominet offering

Electronic News, Feb 3, 1997 by Cynthia Bournellis

Westboro, Mass.--One-year after its incorporation, Gigabit Ethernet start-up Prominet Corp. has completed initial development of its Cajun Switch Core, a set of three chips which will be the foundation for the company's new family of upcoming networking switches.

The Cajun Switch Core consists of three application-specific ASICs. The first is a switching engine that supports an aggregate switching capacity in excess of 20 gigabits per second and 40Gps of backplane capacity, more than 10GB ports or 100 Fast Ethernet Ports, fault-tolerant switching elements and non-blocking performance. Non-blocking is a function the company said will help customers lower networking costs.

"Most companies are putting more ports on a switch than it is capable of supporting," said Prominet co-founder and CEO Menachem Abraham. "When this happens, the switch becomes oversubscribed or blocked. And in a switch that is oversubscribed, there is still some amount of sharing. Our non-blocking design has enough inside switching capacity so that we don't have to put more ports on a switch than it is able to support. This way, you can have multiple simultaneous conversations without interfering with one another." He said this architecture is one answer to resolving network bottlenecks.

The second component in Cajun is a queue management engine, which supports prioritized CoS (class of service) switching with multiple queues; multicast buffering and forwarding; and active intelligent backpressure for Full Duplex and Half Duplex transmissions. Finally, the high-speed forwarding engine component supports the IEEE 802.1Q virtual local area network tagging formats, as well as dynamic multicast switching for TCP/IP.

The Cajun Switch Core is being designed in-house, because the expertise required to design silicon for this emerging market hasn't filtered out into the mainstream, said Mr. Abraham, who added that Prominet has no plans to license its ASIC technology.

Prominet is just one of more than 20 start-ups focusing on Gigabit Ethernet. Others such as Rapid City Communications and Granite Systems (the latter of which was acquired by Cisco Systems last year) are all racing to introduce products this spring at Networld Interop in Las Vegas. Prominet wouldn't comment on whether or not it will demo its boxes at the show, but the company said it is confident its efforts are in line with the competition's. "Based on talks with OEMs, we think we are on top of or ahead of our competitors in our development cycle...and things are on schedule," said Tim Lieto, VP of sales and marketing at Prominet.

Prominet will begin shipping switches later this year, with the first product being a gigabit switch for the campus environment. Subsequent products include a scaleable gigabit multilayer switch for local area networks and a 10Base-T, 100Base-T and 1000Base-T stackable modular hybrid unit.

Also this year, Prominet will acquire a second round of funding. The company received $6 million in venture capital last spring.