Abrizio was a

fabless Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclus ...

semiconductor company which made switching fabric chip sets (

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

s for

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

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.

Founding

Abrizio was founded in 1997, by Professor

Nick McKeown 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 Va ...

as a spinout of the Tiny-tera project at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. It received

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

6M of funding from

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups. History The firm's most successful investment was a 1997 investment of $6.7 million in eBay for 22.1% of the company. In 2011, it invested $12 mill ...

and

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

Product and technology

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 Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...

. Abrizio was the first to introduce a more optimized Input-Buffered Output Queued Switch Fabrics, which addressed the memory efficiency issue of similar technologies. Its technology made better use of memory, making the TT1 a less expensive product. Abrizio's key technology was a sophisticated implementation of a

Wavefront arbiter 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. Context A crossbar is ...

which allowed the switch to make complex arbitration decisions very quickly.

Senior leadership

In 1998, Anders Swahn, who had been executive vice president of sales and marketing at Allied-Telesyn Inc., joined Abrizio as chief executive. 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.

Acquisition

Abrizio was acquired on August 24, 1999, by

PMC-Sierra PMC-Sierra was a global fabless semiconductor company with offices worldwide that developed and sold semiconductor devices into the storage, communications, optical networking, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces. On January 15, 2016, ...

for 4,352,000 shares of PMC-Sierra stock, worth at that time $400M. 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.Light Reading Jan 17, 200
More Cuts at PMC-Sierra
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References

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External links

Sequoia Capital
Companies established in 1997 Defunct networking companies Fabless semiconductor companies Semiconductor companies of the United States