Cavium Ships Game Changing NEURON Search™ Processor Family

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 29, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, and the digital home, today announced shipment of the NEURON Search™ Processor family to Networking OEM customers for their system designs. The new, groundbreaking NEURON Search Processor family is targeted at a wide range of high performance, L2-L4 Network Search applications in Enterprise and Service Provider Infrastructure equipment. It supports both IPv4 and IPv6 rules and delivers 100 million to over 1 billion searches per second with guaranteed low latency. With up to 4x the capacity per chip enabling the replacement of four existing state-of-the-art 40 Mbit TCAMs, the NEURON Search processors consume as little as a quarter of the power of Legacy TCAMs, while slashing the cost, making them ideal for a wide range of Enterprise, Data Center, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Wired/Wireless Service Provider applications.

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Expensive, power hungry legacy TCAMs and low performance algorithmic forwarding search processors until now have slowed the potential wider adoption of search technology. Cavium researchers took a completely different approach and developed groundbreaking, patent-pending search technology that removes several critical constraints, which enables highly flexible storage with very high capacity and low power. Additionally, Cavium NEURON Search technology enables consistent storage and performance while migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 unlike TCAMs.  In TCAMs the number of rules falls dramatically going from IPv4 to IPv6. These compelling advantages will enable wider adoption of search technology.

"NEURON Search Processor family is a new highly-innovative product line from Cavium that provides breakthrough benefits to our customers," said Rajneesh Gaur, General Manager of Cavium's Accelerator & Adapter Group. "Our system test results on this product family so far have met or exceeded all our designs specifications for performance, power, storage and cost.  Our customers are delighted with these results." 

"Cavium has entered the search-coprocessor market as its growth accelerates from the transition of IPv4 to IPv6 combined with greater port rates," said Jag Bolaria, Senior Analyst at The Linley Group.  "NEURON product family's unique technology enables it to offer leading capacity as well as capacity per watt.  These advantages position Cavium to win new designs against alternative TCAM solutions."

The NEURON Search Processor family provides connectivity to a wide range of home-grown and merchant NPUs/ASICs as well as multi-core processors including Cavium's OCTEON^® processors using the industry standard high bandwidth Interlaken/LA serial IO interface. It provides tremendous flexibility in storing rules and specifying rule table formats. An easy to use SDK is provided for configuration, real-time updates without disrupting traffic, and management. The ease-of-use of this software is in sharp contrast to the complex management software needed for TCAMs today and will help OEMs in rapidly integrating these products into their product lines.

The complete NEURON Search Processor hardware and software solution has been successfully tested with real-world rules from several Tier 1 Networking OEMs and has met stringent performance requirements while providing significantly more storage than is available today.

Availability

Cavium is currently sampling the NEURON Search Processor family to customers worldwide with production planned for 1H 2013. Hardware design collateral including data sheet, reference design, hardware design guide, device models and Software Development Kit (SDK) are available now. Please contact your Cavium sales representative for additional details.

About Cavium, Inc

Cavium is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in networking, communications and the digital home. Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software compatible processors ranging in performance from 10 Mbps to over 100 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access & service provider equipment. Cavium's processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium's principal offices are in San Jose, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India and China. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com.

Note on Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions and current expectations. Our actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include but are not limited to the timely and efficient completion of process design and transfer to manufacturing, assembly and test processes; manufacturing difficulties; the quality and performance of our products; the rate at which our new products are adopted; rate of new design wins; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Cavium's business are set forth in the "Risk Factors" section of our Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 3, 2012. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof and qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and we assume no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Cavium, Inc.