A well-heeled start-up, Banderacom, is designing chips for the upcoming InfiniBand specification.
InfiniBand uses a switched fabric to ease the bottlenecks that even the latest PCI-X-based servers will have. The backplane can handle 500M byte/sec to 6G byte/sec links and offers throughput of up to 2.5G byte/sec. Current architectures support 1G byte/sec. InfiniBand-enabled products should appear at year-end.
Banderacom is a fabless semiconductor startup; the company will design products, but look to other vendors to manufacture them. Banderacom’s chips will go into host computers, routers, switches and storage devices.
The company’s IBandit products fit in three categories: target, host applications and switch applications. At present, the company has created a prototype chip set and product development kit for target adapters, which could fit in Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel routers or bridges, or SCSI RAID controllers. Banderacom is presently assessing how its products could be used in host servers and switches.
Veterans of the semiconductor industry founded Banderacom in 1999. The company received funding from Intel, Crossroads Systems, Austin Ventures and Jato Tech Ventures.
