Daryn Lau, Chris Bergen, and Bob Divivier co-founded ZettaCom in Oct. 1999 “to be the leading provider of high performance, fully configurable semiconductor solutions for tomorrow’s optical network.” Zettacom has raised a total of $18 million from equity investors Venrock, Norwest Venture Partners, and Wu-Fu Chen, with debt financing from Comdisco and Imperial Bank. Additional debt financing will be sought in 1H01. The company has approx. 60 – 70 employees, including consultants.

ZettaCom targets system vendors that are building full-featured, high-density switches for the high-end communication market such as optical networking, multiservice, and broadband access. The company is developing chipsets that can be scaled to build Gigabit to Terabit systems with any-service, any-speed interface, and configurable traffic management capabilities to meet a variety of network requirements.

The company recently introduced its product family, based on its “Universal Switch Architecture.” The Universal Switch Architecture, comprised of the ZEST switch fabric family and ZEN protocol processor families, is specifically designed for the OC-12 to OC-192 markets. Both families provide CSIX compatible interface to interface to each other or third party devices.

The ZEST family is a complete switch fabric solution that comprises two ICs, the IXS and the LXI. The ZEST chipset is based on a modular and scalable architecture. The main function of the chipset is to route traffic quickly from the source to the destination, while providing QoS differentiation. It is a true multiservice fabric that combines static circuit switching with dynamic packet switching. The ZEST family scales linearly to Terabits in 40Gbps increments. The chipset is scalable up to 64 OC-192 line cards and the architecture can scale further to support 1024 line cards. The ZEST architecture allows the switch to be implemented either on a single shelf using an electrical backplane or in multiple shelves connected by optical transceivers.

The ZEST-LXI Line Card Switch Interface resides on a line card and supports line card speeds ranging from OC-12 to OC-192 (full duplex). The LXI incorporates a 250MHz CSIX interface allowing it to operate seamlessly with a ZettaCom packet processor or traffic manager, or other CSIX-compatible devices. It manages a set of virtual output queues (to eliminate head-of-line blocking), negotiates the routing path through the switch fabric, and communicates with the IXS switch slices through a SERDES.

The ZEST-IXS Integrated Crossbar and Scheduler resides on a separate switch card. It uses a non-blocking architecture and can support up to 8 classes of service (COS) and spatial multicasting. It can perform data and circuit switching concurrently, providing guaranteed bandwidth and fixed jitter for circuit paths. A single ZEST-IIX has an aggregate bandwidth of 40 Gbps, full duplex.

The ZEN-QM Traffic Manager chipset provides a suite of configurable algorithms that support QoS for any data protocol (IP, MPLS, ATM) at line rates up to 10Gbps. ZEN-QM supports a variety of thresholding mechanisms including WRED, allocates bandwidths among queues with options such as rate shaping and WFQ, provides logical multicasting, and more. Queue bandwidth management mechanisms include per-flow and per-class rate shaping, minimum guaranteed bandwidth reservation, dynamic weighted bandwidth distribution, logical port rate shaping, and per-class priority.

A single ZEN-TSP TDM Service Processor, combined with the ZEST switch fabric, supports OC-192 SONET add/drop and cross-connect functionality at STS-1 granularity. It supports any combination of legal concatenations from STS-3c to STS-192c.

The ZEN-PSP packet processor includes a packet classification and forwarding engine that performs Layer 2-4 functionality at OC-192 line rate. The ZEN-LSP label processor, used in conjunction with ZEN-QM, performs label classification and forwarding along with sophisticated buffer management and bandwidth control for MPLS and ATM protocols at OC-192 line rate.

All devices are fabricated by Lucent on .16u and .25u processes. Lucent performs all backend physical design using a standard cell process. Zettacom’s product roadmap includes more multi-service functionality (what’s missing – fibre channel?), die shrinks, faster speeds, and higher bandwidth.

Daryn Lau, co-founder, President & CEO (most recently managed the development of high-end switching platforms at Cisco’s multi-service switching BU)

Chris Bergen, co-founder and CTO (previously managed the development of several high-end network protocol processing systems at Cisco’s multi-service switching BU)

Bob Divivier, co-founder and Director of Engineering (previously managed the development of several devices that are currently being deployed in Cisco’s multi-service switching platforms)

David Booker, Director of Sales and Business Development (most recently helped launched the Global Consulting and Integration Services alliance business for Nortel’s enterprise solutions organization)

Paul Liesenberg, Director of Strategic Marketing (previously held management positions in business development and product management in Cisco’s Multiservice Switching and Optical Internetworking business units)