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Abrizio was a fabless semiconductor company which made switching fabric chip sets (integrated circuits for computer network switches). Their chip set, the TT1, was used by several large system development companies as the core switch fabric in their high value communication systems.
Abrizio was founded in 1997, by Professor Nick McKeown as a spinout of the Tiny-tera project at Stanford University. [1] It received US$6M of funding from Benchmark Capital and Sequoia Capital. [2]
The product name TT1 referred to "Tiny Tera" meaning a small, highly integrated semiconductor implementation of a terabit/s capacity switching fabric. The Stanford program demonstrated a scalable packet switch that had a terabit-per-second performance in CMOS. [3] Abrizio was the first to introduce a more optimized Input-Buffered Output Queued Switch Fabrics, which addressed the memory efficiency issue of similar technologies. [1] Its technology made better use of memory, making the TT1 a less expensive product. [1] Abrizio's key technology was a sophisticated implementation of a Wavefront arbiter which allowed the switch to make complex arbitration decisions very quickly.
In 1998, Anders Swahn, who had been executive vice president of sales and marketing at Allied-Telesyn Inc., joined Abrizio as chief executive. [4] Abrizio's corporate colors were purple and yellow. The CEO of Abrizio was Anders Swahn. The CTO was McKeown who was taking a leave from his professorship at Stanford. Zubair Hussein was the V.P. of Engineering.
Abrizio was acquired on August 24, 1999, by PMC-Sierra for 4,352,000 shares of PMC-Sierra stock, worth at that time $400M. [5] After the acquisition, the former Abrizio development team completed the TTx switch chip set. In the wake of the bursting of the telecom bubble, PMC-Sierra laid off most of the former Abrizio team in 2001. [6]
Cypress Semiconductor was an American semiconductor design and manufacturing company. It offered NOR flash memories, F-RAM and SRAM Traveo microcontrollers, PSoC programmable system-on-chip solutions, analog and PMIC Power Management ICs, CapSense capacitive touch-sensing controllers, Wireless BLE Bluetooth Low-Energy and USB connectivity solutions.
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A load-balanced switch is a switch architecture which guarantees 100% throughput with no central arbitration at all, at the cost of sending each packet across the crossbar twice. Load-balanced switches are a subject of research for large routers scaled past the point of practical central arbitration.
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A Wavefront arbiter is a circuit used to make decisions which control the crossbar of a high capacity switch fabric in parallel. It was commercialized in the TT1 and TTx chip sets designed by Abrizio and sold by PMC-Sierra.
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Nicholas (Nick) William McKeown FREng, is the SVP/GM of the Network and Edge Group at Intel and a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University. He has also started technology companies in Silicon Valley.
Adisak Mekkittikul received his B.Eng. from King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Thailand and M.S. in electrical engineering from Wichita State University. He completed the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California in 1999, after defending dissertation titled "Scheduling Non-Uniform Traffic in High Speed Packet Switchers and Routers" which he wrote while being mentored by Nicholas William McKeown. He was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Berkeley Concept Research Corp.
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