hotrail

HotRail Inc. was a privately held semiconductor company headquartered on Zanker Road in San Jose, California. It developed switch fabric technology — integrated circuits that act as the connection point among the various chips inside high-end networking equipment — together with CMOS transceivers used for short-range and backplane interconnect. The company announced two products: the HotRail Channel, a parallel high-speed device for connecting networking chips, and SkyRail Link, a serial family for connecting switches and routers. Both were based on a switched-fabric design in which a group of chips forms a high-speed miniature network inside a system.

The company's longer-term development program targeted a physical-layer switching fabric implemented in CMOS, described by Conexant's CEO as broad and scalable and projected to aggregate speeds above 1 terabit per second. At the time of the June 2000 acquisition that fabric was still early in design and had no announced customers, and HotRail had not yet brought a product to market or turned a profit. HotRail was earlier known for work intended to enable Advanced Micro Devices to enter the high-end computing market, but said in May 2000 that it was no longer developing a chipset to let servers work with multiple AMD processors.

HotRail employed 55 people at acquisition, 45 of them engineers. Conexant retained the San Jose offices and placed the business in the newly formed Broadband Internetworking Systems group within its Network Access Division; no layoffs were expected.

Founding story

The company was founded in 1993 as Poseidon Technology Inc. by Daniel Fu, a veteran of Digital Equipment Corp. It initially produced interface chips for advanced servers. Its business plan was later retargeted with the help of Gordon Campbell, founder of Chips and Technologies Inc. and manager of the technology incubator TechFarm; Campbell joined HotRail as chairman in 1999, and Rick Shriner, former president of Exponential Technologies Inc., was named president and chief executive officer.

Traction

At the time of its acquisition the company had not brought a product to market or turned a profit, and its switch fabric had no announced customers. The acquirer said it expected roughly $10 million to $20 million of revenue from the purchase in its next fiscal year beginning October 1.

Latest developments

Conexant Systems announced the acquisition on June 27, 2000, exchanging 7.8 million shares for HotRail; the transaction was expected to close later that week and to dilute Conexant's per-share earnings for about 18 months. HotRail was folded into the Broadband Internetworking Systems group inside Conexant's Network Access Division.