 |
The 2001 Comet Awards
The past year has been tumultuous, but through the haze, we've accomplished once again our annual pick of communication companies poised for great things in the coming year.
The second annual Comet awards are a time of great tribulation here at the worldwide headquarters of Communication Systems Design. All year long we pore over the reams ofproduct, marketing, and corporate information that's sent our way, making mental notes. Finally, we sit down with the editors from our sister publications EE Times,
Embedded Systems Programming, and CommsDesign.com, and by a process that is at once both punishing and scientific, select the top 20 up-and-coming companies we feel are
ready for the big time.
These companies may reach the highest highs, they may be snapped up by other companies, some might even fail (RadioLAN, which had occupied the number 13 spot last year,
eerily enough, is an example of the latter [see this month's "Uplink"). But that goes to show we don't pick these companies for sheer muscle or business connections - we pick them for innovation and vision.
Remember that these awards are named the Comets because, like those curious celestial objects, they cause others to gaze in awe and wonder. So here, in alphabetical order,
are our picks of the companies to watch in the next year.
- Agility
 Tune in, turn on, drop out! Agility is among a handful of vendors who are embracing tunable optical systems as the new wave. Agility's plan, aiming primarily at the DWDM
market, involves using indium phosphide (InP) as a substrate to integrate various optical components at the chip level, to ensure a simple, no-moving-parts approach.
Agility's laser sources are capable of tuning to over 100 channels as of this writing; the company eventually plans to boost this number to more than 1,000 (the company claims a tuning time of under 10 ms).
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Phone: 805.690.1700
URL: http://www.agility.com
Founded: 1998
Financing: Private, venture funded, planning IPO.
Main Products: 3040 High-Power Widely Tunable Laser
- Airslide
Airslide is a wireless company that's been busy making little ones out of big ones. Their plan is to develop technology that will enable operators to merge three network
structures (voice, data, and signaling) to a two-part structure comprising a voice network and an integrated data/signaling network. Eventually, the dual network could be
migrated to an all-inclusive IP design. To accomplish this, Airslide is relying primarily on its eponymous Airslide signaling gateway. This device involves offloading solutions
(short message service [SMS] and SS7 over IP) that will help cellular providers move from current legacy systems to a fully- converged IP network - but, the company says,
in a manner that is transparent to legacy equipment.
Location:Northbrook, IL
Phone: 847.400.5050
URL: http://www.airslide.com
Founded: 1999
Financing: Private
Main Products: Airslide Signaling Gateway
- Andes Networks
Knowing when to do the heavy loading and when to hand off the task to an eager coterie of assistants will save the smart manager much time and effort. Andes takes this time-tested theory into the communication realm with its series of packetized secure socket layer (SSL) accelerators and offloaders, most notably the A5000. These devices
address the myriad of security concerns in our electronic world, which Andes believes is critical to future web infrastructure. In fact the company boldly states that it thinks 100% of Internet traffic will be SSL-encrypted in the near future. Should speed become an issue, as it often will, Andes' line-speed scaleable architecture enables the A5000
to be scaled to terabit rates. And lastly, the company's "Zoo" ASIC implements key RSA encryption math.
Location:Mountain View, CA
Phone: 650.934.8400
URL: http://www.andesnetworks.com
Founded: 2000
Financing: Private
Main Products: A5000 Packetized SSL(tm) accelerator/offloader
- Atheros
Might you wake up one fine day to find that your home and all of its appliances were seamlessly linked together using wireless LAN (WLAN) technology? Atheros is betting that
yes, yes you will, and you will like it. This company is focusing its efforts on delivering 5-GHz WLAN solutions to be integrated. Central to their solution is the AR5000
radio-on-a-chip chipset - a two-chip, all-CMOS solution that works at up to 72 Mbps, and is compliant with the 802.11a specification. Initially, Atheros hopes to integrate
the chip set into access points and adapter cards. After that, the company is banking on getting the chips embedded into various home appliances and computing devices.
Location:Sunnyvale, CA
Phone: 408.773.5200
URL: http://www.atheros.com
Founded: 1998
Financing: Private
Main Products: AR5000 wireless chipset
- Atoga
We liked Atoga before it was cool to like Atoga. We admire their tunable approach to DWDM. We considered their optical application router (OAR) and its clever ways of rapid, converged provisioning of routed IP and legacy TDM services, but were most intrigued by its use of tunable lasers for scaling, increased service velocity, multiple protection levels, and efficient QoS implementation. Since N+I, the company has won a few other awards, including this one - and we don't think this one will be the last.
Location:Fremont, CA
Phone:510.687.9700
URL: http://www.atoga.com
Founded: 1999
Financing: Private
Main Products: Optical application router
- Avici
Avici is eyeing an optical future that expands and contracts in response to the demands of the moment. Specifically, the company is targeting the optical core of carrier networks with its TSR product, a scaleable core router solution that enables carriers to add incremental capacity as needs arise. Bringing it to the optical world in a way that supports intelligent provisioning with all the ancillary functions like QoS, VPNs, and MPLS is certainly innovative. This company is going head to head with Cisco and former Comet winner Juniper, a challenging situation to be sure, but Avici notes that those two companies typically offer fixed-configuration routers that don't provide convenient scaling options.
Location:N. Billerica, MA
Phone:978.964.2000
URL: http://www.avici.com
Founded: 1996
Financing: Publicly traded
Main Products: TSR scaleable core router
- Bay Microsystems
Sittin' on the dock of the Bay, makin' network processors for the OEM core, metro, and access markets - that's Bay Microsystems' plan of action, and we think they may just succeed. The company is planning on 10- to 40-Gbps operation for these chips, with guaranteed wire-speed performance regardless of traffic patterns. The company wisely foresees great variations in traffic as the melange of IP, ATM, frame relay, MPLS, and other packet-based traffic dictates an increasing level of intelligence built into the silicon. Bay Microsystems' "secret ingredient" is deep classification of packets at layers 4 through 7 without using coprocessors. The end product will be a fully deterministic VLIW with embedded support for traffic management; the cores will be built around a 16 x 16 port switch with an internal system bus.
Location:Santa Clara, CA
Phone: 408.653.2181
URL: http://www.baymicrosystems.com
Founded: 1999
Financing: Privately held
Main Products:Developing a family of network processors up to 40 Gbps
- Bookham Technology
There are quite a few proprietary technologies out there, but one we're keeping an eye on is Bookham's active silicon optical circuit (ASOC). This bold take on standard process technology asks the questions, "Why is silicon just used for electronic signals? Why not optical too?" The company uses an innovative etching approach to create waveguides just as you'd create metal vias and interconnects in a regular chip. Given the ongoing cry to reduce dependency on OEO circuitry within routers, we think Bookham may be onto something here, especially as their engineers are already considering methods of reducing bend radii to 500 microns (miniaturization is important, you know, even with optical components). What's more, Bookham's approach lets designers produce waveguides with standard lithography techniques.
Location:Oxfordshire, UK
URL: http://www.bookham.com
Founded: 1988
Financing: Publicly traded (London Stock Exchange)
Main Products:ASOC optical chips
- ConnectOne
There are a number of companies providing various methods to "Internet-enable" standard consumer products, and one we think is a standout is ConnectOne. With a background in flash memory, the founders of this company have set their sites on a firmware-based black box that acts as a go-between, sitting between a device's host processor and the Internet. This device, called the iChip, is an updateable chip that handles connectivity tasks formerly done by the host processor, thereby freeing up the former for more intensive tasks like receiving e-mail, downloading web pages, and processing streaming media. Everyone likes a do-it-yourselfer, but ConnectOne's idea is to apply that mindset to the distinct product, not just the connectivity aspect of the product.
Location:Kfar Saba, Israel
URL: http://www.connectone.com
Founded: 1996
Financing: VC-funded, possibleIPO in 2002
Main Products:iChip Internet controller
- Cambridge Silicon Radio
Cambridge Silicon Radio, or CSR as its friends call it, is a wireless chip company that's hitching its wagon to the Bluetooth star. The company has been interested in component integration since its inception, and this approach is exemplified in the BlueCore family, a complete Bluetooth system - from RF to baseband - on a single chip. CSR has made significant strides in Bluetooth technology, including design wins from the likes of Sony, IBM, and 3Com. The company plans to support additional wireless standards such as 802.11, and has development partnerships with heavy hitters such as ARM (for processor development) and Extended Systems (for software to complement CSR's radio functionality).
Location:United Kingdon
URL: http://www.csr.com
Founded: 1998
Financing: Privately held
Main Products:BlueCore chip
- GoAhead Software
There's no hotter topic than high availability (HA). Everyone who's serious about creating truly useful comm systems knows that reliability is every bit as critical as performance, and is attempting to reach for the vaunted five 9s, and even six 9s, uninterrupted uptime. Fast switching to redundant backup systems goes without mention. GoAhead is a favorite in this realm, providing the increasingly popular SelfReliant family of HA software solutions. Though there is some push back from proprietary HA solutions from the likes of Motorola and Sun, GoAhead is making significant inroads in all types of networking equipment - everything from routers, switches, and base stations to general-purpose CPCI equipment - due to its adaptability and customization potential.
Location:Bellevue, WA
Phone: 425.453.1900
URL: http://www.goahead.com
Founded: 1995
Financing: Private
Main Products:SelfReliant HA software
- Gotham Networks
There are a million connections in the naked city, and this company seeks to connect them all. With a name that evokes a teeming metropolis and the myriad of people connecting therein, Gotham espouses a switch architecture that is decentralized. That is to say, the company's "Switchless Switch" family of edge devices takes a multi-level marketing approach to switching (actually they refer to it as the Universal Service Card architecture).
This approach lets the cards connect any which way through a mesh structure, rather than going through a central switch. This versatile approach is embodied in Gotham's GN 1600 and GN 400 switches, which are software-configurable to work with many traffic types, including IP, frame relay, MPLS, packet over SONET and ATM, up to OC-192 levels. Paths can be provisioned quickly without waiting for hardware cards, with some nifty software tools. Bottom line: Gotham's approach is a new way of thinking about network architectures, and one that actually may let providers build out according to their actual needs, not projections.
Location:Acton, MA
Phone: 978.263.6890
URL: http://www.gothamnetworks.com
Founded: 1999
Financing: Private
Main Products:GN 1600 and GN 400 "Switchless Switches"
- Mayan Networks
Like George W. Bush, Mayan prefers to be a uniter rather than a divider. Hence the company's Unifier line of metro access equipment combines SONET/SDH transport function with multi-service access techniques. Unifier works with existing SONET/SDH infrastructure equipment at the signaling, physical, and control levels as it aggregates, switches, and routes IP, ATM, TDM, and frame relay traffic (from DS0 to OC-48) at layers 1 through 4. Not only that, but the company's approach to traffic grooming helps remove unused traffic early, thanks to the company's Edge DCS cross-connect system, which moves the cross-connect functionality to the edge using DS0 granularity.
Location:San Jose, CA
Phone: 408.392.9900
URL: http://www.mayannetworks.com
Founded: 1998
Financing: Private
Main Products:Unifier
- Optical Switch Corp.
Optical Switch Corp's Kaleidescope and FiberKey modular optical switch lines pair a standard cross-connect architecture with free-space conformal optics technology. In this approach, light within the switches is redirected with mirrors such that the process of using special lenses to focus the light beams - or collimation - is avoided. Optical Switch also touts the 1-ms switching speeds and thrifty power requirements (less than 1 W) of its FiberKey line. Components with specifications like these could fill the bill when designing systems with low power and fast switching requirements, especially in the DWDM arena where optical add-drop multiplexing (OADM) is hot.
Location:Richardson, TX
Phone: 469.330.1400
URL: http://www.opticalswitch.com
Founded: 1997
Financing: Private
Main Products:FiberKey and Kaleidoscope modular optical switches
- Pluris
Pluris aims straight at the IP core with its TeraPlex family of routers, which sport a scaleable architecture along with various improvements to get the optical party started. These include fiber-optic backplane and interconnect structures, a stateful redundant control plane for route and adjacency maintenance following primary control failure, and a selection of ASICs that help the systems maintain line rates when encumbered with QoS, MPLS, and accounting functions. Pluris is also aiming for speed along with scaleability; in June it demonstrated a virtual OC-768 routing configuration that involved four TeraPlex systems running in aggregate but connected with IP-Bond, the company's name for a single logical pipe that enables management and scaling of multiple chassis.
Location:Cupertino, CA
Phone: 408.863.9920
URL: http://www.pluris.com
Founded: 1997
Financing: Private, IPO possible in 2002
Main Products:TeraPlex core router family
- Power X Networks
Power X is a company that's big on switch fabrics. Its main product is TeraChannel, a protocol-independent crossbar fabric that uses virtual output queues to eliminate head-of-line blocking, which happens when a packet that is behind another packet at the head of the line gets blocked when the first one needs a resource that is unavailable at the moment. Power X's fabrics include a central pipelined scheduler function to enable robust QoS, with up to 16 ports of OC-48c per port, ensuring wire-speed performance at any payload size. This adds up to stronger service level agreements (SLAs).
Location:San Jose, CA
Phone: 408.456.2500
URL: http://www.powerxnetworks.com
Founded: 1996
Financing: Private
Main Products:TeraChannel switch fabric
- Sonus Networks
Sonus Networks is dedicated to building carrier-class solutions to enable the ever-popular "everything telephony over IP" goal. They're moving towards this goal with their open services architecture, comprising the GSX9000 open services switch, the PSX6000 and IntelligentIP softswitches, and the SGX2000 SS7 signaling gateway. The GSX9000 is the hub of this architecture, enabling carriers to construct circuit- or packet-switched networks as well as hybrid architectures. The company cites trunking infrastructure applications, as well as integrated access and Internet offload applications, as key market segments for its wares. The company is a big believer in the potential of softswitch applications, as evidenced by its early 2001 acquisition of telecom technologies inc. a Richardson, TX maker of softswitching technologies.
Location:Westford, MA
Phone: 978.692.8999
URL: http://www.sonusnet.com
Founded: 1997
Financing: Publically traded
Main Products:GSX 9000 open services switch
- Southampton Photonics
Named for its hometown in ol' Blighty, Southampton is a force in all things laserian. Offering up the GainNet reconfigurable erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), a high-powered optical amplifier, the company recently was named one of Europe's 30 hottest tech firms by Time Europe, and deservedly so. As optical networks gain ground, and DWDM installations are equipped with more channels and higher data rates, the demands placed on EDFAs grow. The GainNet approach could be described as less is more - a simpler overall design but greater power capability. Southampton also offers the HydraNet family, a series of low-noise, remote pump DFB lasers and arrays with built-in redundancy. For a company going head-to-head with the likes of JDS Uniphase and Corning, we have to say, more power to 'em!
Location:Southampton, UK
URL: http://www. southamptonphotonics.com
Founded: 2000
Financing: Private
Main Products:GainNet reconfigurable EDFA
- Tellium
You would expect a lot from a company that was founded by optical experts from Bellcore and you would be right in doing so. Tellium, armed with over 50 PhDs, is working on many innovative projects, though the main thrust is core optical switches, most notably the Aurora line. These devices provide SONET-like switching capability in a mesh network at the optical layer using 1.3-micron standard interfaces; SONET functions like survivability and multi-carrier interoperability are built in. But in most cases Tellium's wares let you bypass SONET multiplexers, thereby saving a buck or two but still providing decent speed and very fast switchovers in case of failure. Tellium claims non-blocking scaleability from 80 Gbps all the way to - wait for it - 20 Tbps.
Location:Oceanport, NJ
Phone: 732.483.2960
URL: http://www.tellium.com
Founded: 1997
Financing: Publically traded
Main Products:Aurora optical switches, StarNet management software suite
- Village Networks
We consider Village Networks' approach to optical packet processing technology, embodied in its Optical Packet Node 2000 (iOPN2000), to be crafty. The process, which Village refers to as optical flow networking, uses a tight integration of IP routing and optical switching to form multi-wavelength lightpaths that enable construction of versatile photonics switches of the non-blocking variety. The company's iOPN approach scales from a 16 x 6 design up to a 256 x 256 matrix, and according to the company, lets service providers construct all-optical core (mesh or ring), while bypassing intermediate SONET/SDH/ATM devices.
Location:Eatontown, NJ
Phone: 732.460.9850
URL: http://www.villagenetworks.com
Founded: 1998
Financing: Private
Main Products:Optical Packet Node 2000
Acknowledgements
The editorial staff of Communications Systems Design would like to than Loring Wirbel, Rick Merritt, Patrick Mannion, and Craig Matsumoto of EE Times, Lindsey Vereen of Embedded Systems Programming, and John Walko of CommsDesign.com for their assistance.
About the Author
John Poultney is the executive editor of Communication Systems Design . When not sorting through press releases for innovative new communication products, he can be reached at jpoultney@cmp.com.
|
|
