Juniper Networks Inc, the Mountain View, California start-up, that earlier this year won $40m for its networking chip design from six major communications companies, has turned to IBM Corp to custom design and manufacture its ASIC chips for its planned internet routers. Under the agreement, IBM is also responsible for tightly integrating Juniper’s software and IBM silicon logic. According to Scott Kierns, Juniper CEO, the Juniper has been working with IBM on developing the chip design over the past year. Although the company, is remaining cautious about when it will be able to deliver its first products the company says it will have a number of announcements around the turn of the year. The Juniper chip set design when combined with its software, deliver IP data traffic at speeds of 2.4 billion bits per second or more, according to Juniper. Although IBM is to help design and manufacture the chips, there are no plans for the company to use the chips in any of its own networking hardware. The initial chips will not be built using IBM latest copper-based CMOS 7S manufacturing process although Juniper along with Silicon Graphics Inc were the first companies to shop interest in the technique. According to Juniper, copper may be used in later chip designs but Juniper and IBM were already to close delivering their own chips when IBM announced its new copper-based processor technology. In August of this year, Juniper announced partnerships with Ericsson Inc., Lucent Technologies Inc, Northern Telecom Ltd, the Siemens/Newbridge alliance, 3Com Corp and WorldCom Inc subsidiary, UUNET Technologies Inc.
