Cavium has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Xpliant for US $90 million ({EUR}67 million). The Silicon Valley-based fabless semiconductor start-up provides dense switching devices for the data center, cloud computing, service provider and enterprise markets. Cavium has already invested $15 million in the start-up; the remaining $75 million will comprise $40 million ({EUR}30m) in cash and $35 million ({EUR}26m) in stock. Current switch silicon use a fixed-function, hardwired architecture that lack the flexibility needed for emerging requirements such as software-defined networking (SDN), says Cavium. Another disadvantage of fixed-function architectures is that system vendors cannot differentiate their products for data center, cloud, telecom and the enterprise applications.
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