Thursday, August 14, 2014

Intel to Acquire LSI's Axxia Networking Business from Avago

Intel to acquire LSI's Axxia Networking Business and related assets for $650 million in cash from Avago Technologies.

The Axxia Networking Business generated revenues of $113 million in calendar 2013 and employs approximately 650 people.

The sale follows Avago Technologies acquisition of LSI earlier this year in a deal valued at $6.6 billion

http://www.avagotech.com/

In November 2013, LSI announced first commercial delivery of its Axxia 4500 family of communication processors for enterprise and data center networking applications such as evolving application aware networking.

LSI's Axxia 4500, which is the company's first ARM technology-based communication processor, features a new "StreamSight" next-generation Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine that provides improved Software-Defined Networks (SDN) controller traffic inspection, efficiency of network management, QoS, security and other network functions. The Axxia 4500 processors combine LSI's acceleration engines with up to four ARM Cortex-A15 cores with a CoreLink CCN-504 coherent, QoS aware interconnect in 28nm process technology. The processors also include up to 100 Gbps of L2 switching functionality.

The company said that by combining its Ethernet switches, networking accelerators and "Virtual Pipeline" technology with power-efficient ARM cores, its new Axxia 4500 can address the performance challenges facing next-generation networks. Customers using the Axxia 4500 are able to solve the control plane scalability challenges of SDN and extract the necessary information required to enable Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) implementations without burdening the server processor.

In 2013, LSI introduced its ARM-based family of Axxia 5500 processors designed for multi-radio LTE base stations, cell site routers, gateways and mobile backhaul equipment.

The new processors combine up to 16 ARM Cortex-A15 cores with LSI specialized networking accelerators to optimize performance and power efficiency.  On-chip network accelerators deliver up to 50 Gbps packet processing, 20 Gbps security processing and 160 Gbps of Ethernet switching via 16 10G Ethernet interfaces. LSI plans to offer several versions with different core counts and throughput capabilities.  The chip design leverages ARM’s CoreLink CCN-504 low-latency interconnect in 28nm process technology.

LSI said its combination of networking expertise, specialized acceleration engines and Virtual Pipeline technology with ARM’s power-efficient processors and interconnect IP delivers communication processors that are uniquely suited for building intelligent, heterogeneous networks.