PMC-Sierra offers $400M for packet-switching startup

PMC-Sierra offers $400M for packet-switching startup
BURNABY, B.C. -- PMC-Sierra Inc. has pumped up its existing talents in ATM and Ethernet switching with an offer of approximately $400 million for the low-profile startup, Abrizio Inc. PMC is offering 4,352,000 shares of common stock for Abrizio, which was spun from Stanford University's Tiny-Tera project.

Tiny-Tera was a Stanford program funded in part by Texas Instruments Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. The project showed that a scalable packet switch capable of terabit-per-second performance could be implemented in CMOS. After the Tiny-Tera demonstration was completed in mid-1997, Stanford associate professor

Nick McKeown founded Abrizio, and pulled in $6 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital and Sequoia Capital one year ago.

Anders Swahn, the former executive vice president of sales and marketing at Allied-Telesyn Inc., joined Abrizio last year as chief executive. He will remain with PMC-Sierra and report directly to PMC chief executive Bob Bailey.

Abrizio had won some early designs in broadband backbone equipment accounts for its TT1 packet-switching chip set. The physical- and data-link layer chip set competes with those from companies such as Lucent Technologies and Power X Ltd.