Abrizio was a fabless semiconductor company which made switching fabric chip sets (integrated circuit

Integrated circuit

An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...

s for computer network

Computer network

A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....

  switches). Their chip set, the TT1, was used by several large system development companies as the core switch fabric in their high value communication systems.

Founding

It was founded in 1997 by Professor Nick McKeown

Nick McKeown

Nicholas William McKeown, better known as Nick McKeown, is an English-American expert in computer networking. His career includes both education and starting companies in Silicon Valley.-Biography:Nick McKeown was born April 7, 1963 in Bedford, England....

 as a spinout of the Tiny-tera project at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 and received US$6M of funding from Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital is a venture capital firm responsible for the early stage funding of some very successful startups. In 1997, the firm invested $6.7 million in eBay, which became worth more than $5 billion by the spring of 1999. Other high-profile investments include Ariba, Juniper Networks, Red...

 and Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital is a Californian venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital "one of the highest-caliber venture firms", and noted that it is "one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture-capital firms"...

. In 1998 Anders Swahn, who had been executive vice president of sales and marketing at Allied-Telesyn Inc., joined Abrizio as chief executive.

Product and technology

The product name TT1 referred to "Tiny Tera" meaning a small, highly integrated semiconductor implementation of a terabit/s capacity switching fabric. Abrizio's corporate colors were purple and yellow.

Abrizio's key technology was a sophisticated implementation of a Wavefront arbiter

Wavefront arbiter

A Wavefront arbiter is a circuit used to make decisions which control the crossbar of a high capacity switch fabric in parallel. It was commercialized in the TT1 and TTx chip sets designed by Abrizio and sold by PMC-Sierra.-Context:...

 which allowed the switch to make complex arbitration decisions very quickly.

Senior leadership

The CEO of Abrizio was Anders Swahn. The CTO was McKeown who was taking a leave from his professorship at Stanford. Zubair Hussein was the V.P. of Engineering.

Acquisition

Abrizio was acquired on August 24, 1999 by PMC-Sierra

PMC-Sierra

PMC-Sierra is a fabless semiconductor company which develops and sells devices into the communications, storage, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces.-Corporate history:...

 for 4,352,000 shares of PMC-Sierra stock, worth at that time $400M. After the acquisition, the former Abrizio development team completed the TTx switch chip set. In the wake of the bursting of the telecom bubble

Dot-com bubble

The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...

, PMC-Sierra laid off most of the former Abrizio team in 2001.