Prominet Corp, a new company established to design, build and market workgroup solutions employing new Gigabit Ethernet technology, has announced the completed development of its Cajun Switch Core, a set of three chips which will be used as the foundation of the company’s gigabit scaled campus networking architecture and later for a gigabit-scaled multilayer switch. It’s unclear when these are due to come to market. Founded in February last year, Prominet is a privately held, venture capital-funded company based in Westborough, Massachusetts employing around 30 people. The company’s executives were formally with Chipcom Corp (CI No 2,716), suppliers of intelligent switching systems, which was acquired by 3Com Corp in October 1995. The Cajun Switch Core consists of three application-specific chips – a switching engine, a queue management engine and a forwarding engine, providing switching functions, queue management capabilities and high speed packet forwarding for high capacity, high density Gigabit switching. With a switching capacity in excess of 20 gigabits per second, the Cajun Switch Core incorporates the latest Ethernet innovations such as flexible VLAN virtual local area network architecture for management of campus-wide resources and dynamic multicast switching in hardware and software. Prominet is the latest company to turn its attention to Gigabit Ethernet technology. Prominet is a member of the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance which was established last May in an attempt to influence the development of Ethernet Standards under the IEEE (CI No 2,915), its original 11 members now up to 86. Cisco Systems Inc last year acquired Granite Systems Inc for $22m, a one-year old company formed by Sun Microsystems Inc co-founder Andy Bechtolshiem, for its Gigabit Ethernet switching technology (CI No 2991), indicating just how valuable the new technology is perceived to be.
