PetaSwitch

Designs chips for metropolitan and wide area networks.

PetaSwitch Solutions, Inc. was formed in November 2000, to develop multi-terabit switch fabric silicon for metropolitan area networks and wide area networks. The chip set architect is composed of a Virtual Queue Manager (VQM) and a Concurrent Switch (CSW). They are differentiated from all other switch fabric chips by three patented features: 1) A request/grant protocol, 2) A three-stage intelligent flow control mechanism and 3) A spatial multicasting scheme. The chips can be replicated to obtain higher numbers of ports and/or higher bandwidth of the ports. Port speeds from OC-48 (2.5 Gbps) to OC-3072 (160 Gbps) can be accommodated to produce switches with over 5 Tbps bandwidth.