1999-2000. Network processor and acceleration market were talking acquisitions and standards. Intel acquired NetBoost, Lucent acquired Agere, Motorola acquired C-Port and several others followed suit. While this was on in the market, Govind Kizhepat was silently chalking out his next plan of action. After selling off his semiconductor company iCompression to GlobeSpan for $400 million, Kizhepat had a brief stint with Benchmark Capital Ventures where the idea of his next company got seeded.

With a focus on enterprise datacenter and the emerging 10Gigabite Ethernet interface (GbE), Kizhepat set up his new venture, NetXen Inc. in 2002, but went undercover, architecting radical changes at the chip level and software level to make his new generation of chips work seamlessly with existing operating systems and hardware platforms as well.

The New Paradigm
With a challenge to enhance the already invented wheel of Network Processors, NetXen went forth offering clients with solutions that can be sheaved into their server designs and solutions with significant advantages in performance and power efficiency, without altering their own designs.

Moving away from the traditional chip plate, NetXen’s 10GbE and multi-gigabit technology focuses on significant amounts of system software and firmware embedded into a full-fledged and effective programmable solution. The chip is optimized to take complete advantage over the existing system architectures.

Inherent deficiencies in traditional CPUs to handle network packets, gave way to network processors. However, network processors were found to be useful only as flow devices to sort headers in packets. But servers are needed to do much beyond just sorting packets and headers. A more stateful termination of network traffic and processing became necessary. NetXen exploited these weaknesses in network processors and traditional CPU architectures to create chips to process network I/O and security, more efficiently both in terms of performance and cost.