Albert Heller, Mark Waite, Henry Chow, and Dr. Mark Janoska founded Extreme Packet Devices in March 1999 to develop “IP and ATM QoS-optimized” traffic management and packet processing devices. Extreme’s mission is “to provide the most advanced traffic management and packet processing devices for enabling OC-192c and greater line speeds for next generation switch/routers.” First round financing of $3 million was raised in May from Wesley Clover Corp., Furneaux & Company and several private investors including Antoine Paquin, president and CEO of Philsar and Scott Marshal, former Exec. VP of switching products at Newbridge. In Q4, Extreme will raise another round of about $5 million. The company has 12 employees and anticipates doubling in size by year-end.

Extreme’s technology will enable customers to build next generation gigabit and terabit switch/routers with wire-speed QoS at OC-192C line speeds. The company’s first product is a traffic management chipset, which supports line interface rates from 622Mbps to 10Gbps (OC-192), including Gigabit Ethernet, with channelization. The chipset consists of a traffic management data path element, buffer management element, scheduling element, and packet processing element. The chipset is intended to reside on a line interface card between the packet classification processor and switch fabric. Samples are expected by the end of 2000. The chipset consists of 3 ICs for each direction and will be fabricated in a 0.18u standard cell process. The total gate count is estimated to be 6 to 7 million gates. An OC-192 packet processing chipset is currently in the concept stage and is expected to lag the traffic management chipset by at least 6 months.

Extreme estimates that the market for its products will reach $500 million to $1B by 2004. The company is currently in negotiations with several potential customers including Ascend/Lucent. Extreme is also in foundry negotiations with IBM and TI. The company has several undisclosed partners. Sales will be handled on a direct basis and through partnerships and strategic alliances.

Many companies, such as Agere, C-Port, Solidum, and others are focusing on the packet classification problem. Yet we have not seen any besides Extreme that are focused on traffic management. This piece has been left to the system OEMs to implement in proprietary ASICs. Extreme appears to have carved out a nice niche, while the classification space is getting crowded.

Albert Heller, acting President & CEO
Mark Waite, VP of marketing and business development
Henry Chow,VP of Engineering
Dr. Mark Janoska, CTO