Abrizio

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Abrizio was a fabless semiconductor company which made switching fabric chip sets. Their chip set, the TT1, was used by several large system development companies as the core switch fabric in their high value communication systems.

1 Founding
2 Product and technology
3 Senior leadership
4 Acquisition
5 Notes & references
6 External links

[edit] Founding

It was founded in 1997 by Dr. Nick McKeown as a spinout of the Tiny-tera project at Stanford University and received USD 6M of funding from Benchmark Capital and Sequoia Capital^[1]. In 1998 Anders Swahn, who had been executive vice president of sales and marketing at Allied-Telesyn Inc., joined Abrizio as chief executive.^[2]

[edit] 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. Abrizio's corporate colors were purple and yellow.

Abrizio's key technology was a sophisticated implementation of a Wavefront arbiter which allowed the switch to make complex arbitration decisions very quickly.

[edit] Senior leadership

The CEO of Abrizio was Anders Swahn. The CTO was Dr. Nick McKeown who was taking a leave from his professorship at Stanford University. Zubair Hussein was the V.P. of Engineering.

[edit] Acquisition

Abrizio was acquired on August 24, 1999 by PMC-Sierra for 4,352,000 shares of PMC-Sierra stock, worth at that time USD400M^[3]. 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^[4].