Cisco to buy Spans Logic to accelerate packet switching

Stuart Corner
Monday, 02 April 2007 10:48

IT Industry - Deals

Cisco Systems is to acquire privately-held Spans Logic of California, a manufacturer of chips that, according to Cisco, "dramatically improve packet processing speeds across the network."

Cisco says that embedding Spans Logic technology into its switch platforms will lead to new levels of feature efficiency. "It is imperative that the network be tightly integrated with very high speed processing capabilities eliminating bottlenecks," said Tom Edsall, senior vice president, of Cisco's Datacenter Business Unit With Spans Logic, Cisco will be able to improve overall traffic efficiency and throughput across the network."

Spans Logic has said little about its work to date, its web site  says: " We are not yet ready to go public with our technology." However it adds: "We are developing a line of products that challenge long-held assumptions about a fundamental function in computing...Our technology derives from an elegant reformulation of the problem, an insight that allows us to overcome serious bottlenecks related to power consumption, speed, and cost of key applications."

According to Light Reading, "Cisco's Catalyst switches already use TCAM (Ternary Content Addressable Memory), the kind of technology that Spans Logic was building. The TCAM is a specialised piece of memory that helps switches perform routing table lookups. The result of these lookups determines how the switch handles a packet, so it tells the switch if a packet should pass through or be dropped. What Spans Logic is doing is building a cheaper TCAM, one that doesn't require so many specialised (expensive) parts."

Spans Logic was founded in 2004 and has 14 employees in Mountain View. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Spans Logic team and products will be integrated into DCBU reporting into Edsall.