AMCC and Hifn Working Alliance

Hifn, Inc. and Applied Micro Circuits Corporation announced a working alliance to provide a series of reference designs for networking and storage solutions. The new reference designs combine the core strengths of the AMCC Power Architecture processors, which deliver a performance optimized PowerPC core with a high- bandwidth memory and I/O subsystem and Hifn’s heavy-lifting capabilities for capacity optimization and data security through the company’s Applied Services Processors (ASPs) and card-level products. Customers will be able to take the joint AMCC and Hifn reference designs and deliver wireless base stations, access points, network attached storage, virtual tape libraries, disk- to-disk backup, and other networking and storage solutions.

The partnership brings together two industry leaders with complementary technologies that offer potential customers competitive advantages in performance, integration, time-to-market, energy efficiency and scalability. AMCC’s highly integrated Power Architecture processors, which are used in a range of consumer, enterprise, networking and storage products, complement Hifn’s ASPs and card-level products, which are employed by the leading network and storage vendors to differentiate their products and speed time to market.

"Working with Hifn presents an excellent opportunity for us to deliver designs that provide our customers with superior power-saving, performance, and integration benefits," said Russell Johnson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Storage Business Unit for AMCC. "This also provides AMCC an opportunity to further expand our footprint in the embedded networking and data storage markets. As the volume of rich digital content continues to grow, businesses and consumers need new technologies for storing, sharing and protecting their data. With this joint effort, we are enabling entirely new categories of storage systems designed to help consumers and businesses manage and secure their valuable content."

"The combination of Hifn and AMCC technology provides networking and storage system vendors with platforms that incorporate proven, market-leading products that can radically improve their system cost, functionality and time to market," said Albert E. Sisto, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Hifn. "There are tremendous growth opportunities in developing open system storage solutions with other technology leaders that have a complementary fit with our company. The combination of Hifn and AMCC is one such complementary fit in terms of technology, markets and customers."

Hifn and AMCC plan to create the reference designs as part of a comprehensive development platform that will enable storage OEMs and ODMs to rapidly bring their products to market. One of the first designs expected to result from the new partnership is a storage platform that combines the power efficiency and high-performance of AMCC’s PowerPC 460SX storage processor with Hifn’s Express DR cards for capacity optimization, creating a powerful design for a broad range of open storage applications, including disk-to-disk backup, virtual tape libraries, data de-duplication and continuous data protection.