Siliquent Technologies

About Siliquent Technologies

Siliquent Technologies Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company founded in 2001 by CTO Amit Oren and EVP Dan Arazi, with serial entrepreneur Barak Hachamov also involved in its establishment. The company was headquartered in Mountain View, California, and maintained research and development facilities in Tel Aviv, Israel. Siliquent specialized in developing 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network interface controllers (NICs) designed to enhance server performance for networking, network storage, and clustering applications.

The company's core product was an Ethernet processing unit that converted standard NICs into intelligent NICs, enabling storage, networking, and clustering over a physical Ethernet connection. This technology provided advanced capabilities such as TCP/IP offload, iSCSI, and RDMA on a single-chip controller. Siliquent's solutions were targeted at the storage area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) markets. The firm successfully raised significant capital, including a $21 million funding round in 2004 led by Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, with participation from Vertex Venture Capital, Alta Berkeley Venture Partners, Greylock, and Benchmark Capital.

On July 19, 2005, Broadcom Corporation announced its acquisition of Siliquent Technologies for approximately $76 million in cash. At the time of the acquisition, Siliquent had 59 employees. The deal was a strategic move for Broadcom to accelerate its entry into the 10GbE converged-NIC (C-NICs) market, particularly for server LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) applications, which were projected to see high-volume adoption.