Chelsio Communications

Chelsio Communications
Company typePrivately held company
IndustrySemiconductors
Electronics
Communications
Founded2000; 24 years ago (2000)
Sunnyvale, California
HeadquartersSunnyvale, California, U.S.
Number of employees
175
Websitewww.chelsio.com

Chelsio Communications is a privately held technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California with a design center in Bangalore, India. Early venture capital funding came from Horizons Ventures,[1] Invesco, Investor Growth Capital, NTT Finance, Vendanta Capital, Abacus Capital Group, Pacesetter Capital Group, and New Enterprise Associates.[2] A third round of funding raised $25 million in late 2004.[3] LSI Corporation was added as investor in 2006 in the series D round.[4] By January 2008, a $25M financing round was announced as series E.[5] In 2009, an additional $17M was raised from previous investors plus Mobile Internet Capital.[6]

Chelsio sells hardware and software solutions including protocol acceleration technology, Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions. Chelsio was an early vendor of 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology, announcing a product in 2004,[7] an alliance with Foundry Networks,[8] and measurements in 2005.[9] Chelsio products were used to build the Coates supercomputer at Purdue University in 2009.[10] In August 2009 Chelsio announced the Unified Storage Software product to provide storage area network and network-attached storage functions.[11]

The company holds several patents, dating from one for reduced overhead direct memory access (DMA) initially filed in 2002.[12] A fourth generation was announced in 2011.[13] In January 2013 Chelsio announced the Terminator 5 application specific integrated circuit, which brings all of the company's protocol acceleration technology to 40 Gbit/s speeds, with the roadmap to 100 Gbit/s scheduled for 2015.[14] Its products such as network interface controller cards are sold by distributors.[15] The Chelsio Unified Storage Router product is also marketed by Dell,[16] and was certified to work with tape drives from Quantum Corporation in 2011.[17] Chelsio is involved with the OpenFabrics Alliance.[18]

  1. ^ "Portfolio". Horizons Ventures. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  2. ^ "Portfolio Investments". New Enterprise Associates. Archived from the original on April 12, 2013. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  3. ^ "Chelsio adds $25M in funding". San Jose Business Journal. January 17, 2005. Retrieved May 28, 2013.
  4. ^ Loring Wirbel (June 19, 2006). "LSI Logic invests in 10-Gbit Ethernet card maker Chelsio". EE Times. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  5. ^ "Chelsio Raises $25 Million in Private Funding". Inside HPC. January 3, 2008. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  6. ^ "Chelsio Announces $17M in Private Funding". Inside HPC. November 16, 2009. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  7. ^ Phil Hochmuth (May 24, 2004). "New hardware brings 10G LANs closer to reality". Network World. Archived from the original on June 29, 2013. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  8. ^ Jeff Caruso (November 23, 2004). "Foundry, Chelsio strike 10 Gigabit alliance". Network World. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  9. ^ Jeff Caruso (July 19, 2005). "TCP Offload lifts 10G Ethernet over other technologies". Network World. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  10. ^ "Purdue builds Big Ten's biggest computer, again". News release. Purdue University. July 20, 2009. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  11. ^ Chris Mellor (August 27, 2009). "Chelsio imitates LeftHand Networks: Launches new USS enterprise". The Register. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  12. ^ US patent 6,813,652, Mark Stadler, Asgeir Thor Eiriksson, and Kianoosh Naghshineh, "Reduced-overhead DMA"  PCT filed April 11, 2002, published November 2, 2004
  13. ^ "Chelsio Announces 4th Generation Terminator Chip". News release. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  14. ^ "Chelsio Announces Terminator 5 ASIC 40 Gigabit Ethernet iWARP RDMA, iSCSI, TOE, FCoE, NIC Engine". News release. January 22, 2013. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  15. ^ "ColfaxDirect Serves up Chelsio T4 10Gb Ethernet Adapters". Inside HPC. March 15, 2011. Retrieved May 23, 2013.
  16. ^ "Chelsio Unified Storage 10G/1G iSCSI-to-SAS Router". Dell web site. Archived from the original on June 28, 2013. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  17. ^ "Quantum and Chelsio: Easy Tape Attach for IP SANs" (pdf). September 2, 2011. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  18. ^ "Open Fabrics Workshop to Focus on HPC, Big Data, and the Cloud". Inside HPC. March 1, 2012. Retrieved May 23, 2013.