14 July 2003 Burlington, MA Lightwave--Xelerated, a supplier of high-performance network processors, today announced that it has raised $12.5 million from Atlas Venture, Alta Partners, and Startupfactory in a new round of financing. The funding will be used in ongoing sales and marketing of the X10q network processor family, and the development of next generation products. To date, the company has raised a total of $26 million.
"Xelerated has managed to take a breakthrough product to the market with fewer resources than the industry average," says Gerry Montanus, Atlas Venture. "We are excited about Xelerated's potential. With the strength of the technology and the market opportunity that this represents they are well positioned for success."
"I see Xelerated as one of the potential winners in the network processor industry," says Eric Mantion, at In-Stat/MDR. "Xelerated's data flow approach has made network processors a viable solution for the high-volume accounts now emerging in the enterprise backbone, metro, and optical edge segments."
With Xelerated's data flow architecture there is no need for complex inter-processor interconnections or redundant data and instruction storage. The X10q chip provides leading cost and power per port with 40 Gbits/sec of programmable packet processing at 6.5W. The data flow approach also allows for fully deterministic execution, which compared to conventional multi-RISC-based architectures results in a simpler programming model and guaranteed wire speed performance.
"I have followed the network processor developments for several years and until now have not seen one that I feel can meet my high performance objectives," says Earl Ferguson, former chief technology officer of Foundry Networks. "Xelerated's solution is the first that I believe can supply true guaranteed line rate performance and meet the requirements of a wide range of future enterprise and service provider solutions."
"Xelerated's customer projects have confirmed that there is a volume market for highly efficient, programmable network processors," says Sven-Christer Nilsson, chairman of Xelerated, founder of Startupfactory and former chief executive officer of Ericsson. "With its programmable high density, low-power product offering, Xelerated can penetrate the high-volume accounts that have been out of reach for traditional network processor vendors."
A fabless semiconductor company, Xelerated's approach combines the efficiency of an ASIC with the programmability of traditional network processors. The company sampled its first generation of network processors in February 2003. The X10q family of network processors consists of three products: the X10q-e, optimized for enterprise Ethernet and OC-48 solutions; the X10q-m for advanced metro Ethernet applications; and the X10q-w for the high-end SONET/SDH products. All products are equipped with 4 SPI4.2 ports. The offering also includes a software development kit and reference design kit. Xelerated has offices in Burlington, San Jose, and Stockholm.