Dishwasher: Ethernet adapter driver

Sunday 6 January 2013

Ethernet adapter driver

Alteon was founded in 1996 by Mark Bryers, John Hayes, Ted Schroeder and Wayne Hathaway.

Alteon introduced innovative products such as the ACEswitch 180, which was the first network switch to deliver Ethernet with selectable speed, 10/100 or 1000 Mbit/s, on every port via autonegotiation. Their ACEdirector Layer 4-7 switch was designed as an integrated services front-end and server load balancer. They also introduced Jumbo Frames (up to 9,000 bytes) with their ACEnic adapters, and supported by their switches.[2]

In addition to their Server Switches, Alteon produced the first Gigabit Ethernet network interface card (NIC) in 1997. Alteon's third generation Gigabit Ethernet NIC (code named "Tigon") became the basis for Broadcom's family of ethernet controllers (series BCM570x) [3] and has shipped over 60 million cores. It was used in low-cost NICs from vendors such as 3Com.[4]

In July 2000, Nortel Networks announced it was buying Alteon for US$6 billion U.S. in stock. The deal had originally been announced with a value of $7.8 billion, but the stock market plummeted before the deal closed in October.[1][5] Nortel rolled the ACEDirector and ACESwitch products into its Personal Internet product line, but one year later sales had slowed down.[6] On February 22, 2009 Nortel Networks announced they would sell the Alteon corporate switching line to Radware, for $17.65 million.[7][8]