Mellanox Technologies to acquire EZchip for $811M
Eyal Waldman
Mellanox makes InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnection platforms and products for the data centre while EZchip sells network and multi-core processors that are used in carrier edge routers and enterprise platforms.
EZchip’s customers include Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, Oracle, Avaya and Cisco Systems.
“Mellanox needs to diversify its business; it is still heavily dependent on the high-performance computing market and InfiniBand,” says Bob Wheeler, principal analyst, networking at market research firm The Linley Group. “EZchip helps move Mellanox into markets and customers that it would not have access to with its existing products.”
CEO Eyal Waldman says Mellanox will continue to focus on the data centre and not the WAN, and that it plans to use EZchip’s products to add intelligence to its designs. Mellanox's Ethernet expertise may also find its way into EZchip’s ICs.
But analysts do expect Mellanox to benefit from telecom. “The big change has to do with Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and the fact that service provider’s data centres are starting to look more and more like cloud data centres,” says Wheeler. “There is an opportunity for Mellanox to start selling to the large carriers and that is a whole new market for the company.”
Acquiring EZchip
Both companies will ensure continuity and use the same product lines to grow into each other’s markets, said Waldman on a conference call to announce the deal: “Later on will come more combined solutions and products.” First product collaborations are expected in 2016 with more integrated products appearing from 2017.
“Mellanox sees a need to add intelligence to its core products and it does not really have the expertise or the intellectual property,” says Wheeler. One future product of interest is the smart or intelligence network interface controller (NIC). “By working together they could product quite a compelling product,” says Wheeler.
In 2014 EZchip acquired Tilera for $50 million. The value of the deal could have risen to $130 million but was dependent on targets that Tilera did not meet, says Wheeler. Tilera's products include multi-core processors, NICs and white box security appliances. EZchip has also announced the Tile-Mx product family using Tilera’s technology, the most powerful family device will feature 100, 64-bit ARM cores.
The primary application of Tilera’s products is security applications: deep-packet inspection and layer 7 processing. Instead of replacing the general-purpose processor in a security appliance, an alternative approach is to use an intelligent NIC card with a Tilera processor connected via the PCI Express bus to an Intel Xeon-based server. “The card can do a lot of the packet processing offloaded from the Xeon,” says Wheeler.
Another area where EZchip’s NPS processor can be used is in more dedicated appliances or in an intelligent top-of-rack switch. The NPS would perform security as well as terminating overlay protocols used for network virtualisation in the data centre. “You can terminate all those [overlay] protocols in a top-of-rack switch and offload that processing from the server,” says Wheeler.
The key benefit of InfiniBand is its very low latency but the flip side is that the protocol is limited with regard routing to larger fabrics. Adding intelligence could benefit Mellanox’s core Infiniband fabric products, notes Wheeler.
EZchip’s founder and CEO Eli Fruchter said he expects the merger to open doors for EZchip among more hyper-scale data centre players: “With the merger we believe we can be a lot more successful in data centres than by continuing by ourselves.”
Mellanox has made several acquisitions in recent years. It acquired data centre switch fabric player Voltaire in 2011, and in 2013 it added silicon photonics start-up Kotura and chip company IPTronics in quick succession. Now with EZchip's acquisition it will add packet processing and multi-core processor IP to its in-house technology portfolio.
The EZchip acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2016.
Further information:
Mellanox’s Waldman: We've discussed merging for years, click here
Mellanox to acquire silicon photonics player Kotura
Source: Gazettabyte
Mellanox Technologies has announced its intention to acquire silicon photonics player, Kotura, for $82 million.
The acquisition will enable Mellanox to deliver 100 Gigabit Infiniband and Ethernet interconnect in the coming two years. lt will also provide Kotura with the resources needed to bring its 100 Gigabit QSFP to market. Mellanox will also gain Kotura's optical engine for use in active optical cables and new mid-plane platform designs, as well as future higher speed interfaces.
The news is also significant for the optical component industry. Kotura is one of the three established merchant silicon photonics players - the others being LightWire and Luxtera - that have spent years developing their technologies.
LightWire was acquired by Cisco Systems in March 2012 for US $271 million and now Mellanox plans to acquire Kotura. The two equipment vendors recognise the value of the technology, bringing it in-house to reduce system interconnect costs and as a long term differentiator for their equipment and ASIC designs. Mellanox, as a silicon photonics player, will compete with Intel, with its own silicon photonics technology, and Cisco Systems.
Kotura has been using its technology to sell telecom products such as variable optical attenuators and multiplexers. The start-up recently announced its 100 Gig QSFP that uses wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmitter and receiver chips. The product is to become available in 2014.
In an interview last year, Kotura's CTO, Mehdi Asghari, discussed a roadmap showing how its 100 Gigabit silicon photonics technology could scale to 400 Gigabit and eventually 1.6 Terabit.
"Our devices are capable of running at 40 or 50 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps), depending on the electronics. The electronics is going to limit the speed of our devices. We can very easily see going from four channels at 25Gbps to 16 channels at 25Gbps to provide a 400 Gigabit solution," Asghari told Gazettabyte.
Kotura also discussed how the line rate could be increased to 50Gbps either using a non-return-to-zero (NRZ) line rate or using a multi-level modulation such as pulse amplitude modulation (PAM).
"To get to 1.6 Terabit transceivers, we envisage something running at 40Gbps times 40 channels or 50Gbps times 32 channels. We already have done a single receiver chip demonstrator that has 40 channels, each at 40Gbps," said Asghari.
"These things in silicon are not a big deal. The III-V guys really struggle with yield and cost. But you can envisage scaling to that level of complexity in a silicon platform."
Silicon photonics will not replace existing VCSEL or indium phosphide-based transceiver designs. But there is no doubting silicon photonics is emerging as a key optical technology and the segment is heating up.
If the early start-ups are being acquired, there have been more recent silicon photonics players entering the marketplace such as Aurrion, Skorpios Technologies and Teraxion. There are also internal developments among equipment players such as Alcatel-Lucent, HP Labs and IBM. Indeed Kotura has worked closely with Oracle (Sun Microsystems)
Further acquisitions of silicon photonic players should be expected as companies start designing next generation, denser systems and adopt 100 Gigabit and faster interfaces.
Equally, established optical component and module companies will likely enter quietly (and not so quietly) the marketplace adding silicon photonics to their technology toolkits when the timing is right.
Trends to watch
Two industry trends are underway regarding silicon photonics.
The first is system vendors wanting to own the technology to reduce their costs while recognising a need to control and understand the technology as they tackle more complex equipment designs.
The other, what at first glance is a contrarian trend, is the democratisation of silicon photonics.
The technology is slowly passing from the select few to become more generally available for industry use. For this to happen, the relevant design tools need to mature as do third-party fabrication plants that will manufacture the silicon photonics designs.
Appendix:
On June 4th, 2013, Mellanox announced a definitive agreement to acquire chip company IPtronics for $47.5 million as it builds out its in-house technologies for optical interconnect. Click here
Futher reading:
Avago to acquire CyOptics, click here