The AL300M offering combines the network management chip with a software package called RoXMan, which Allayer developed in conjunction with Wind River Systems Inc.

Large switches built by the likes of Cisco tend to have the vendor's proprietary management software, while smaller switches often go without.

Allayer hopes to entice OEMs to build managed switches for the latter camp, possibly even down to the home-office or home-network level. That is the area where Allayer's switching chips are best used, as well as one that the larger networking-hardware vendors haven't overtaken yet.

In this market, Allayer sees two potential niches. Vendors of small, inexpensive switches — particular in the Taiwanese market — are an obvious target, said David Wong, director of marketing for Allayer. But the bigger players might also want to use third-party products and software for their lower-end offerings, he said.

Exploring other RTOSes

"Nortel and Cisco have traditionally been in the high-end market," Wong said. "If they spend $3 million or $4 million developing a [low-end] software solution, that's not very cost-efficient."

RoXMan is based on Wind River's VxWorks, but Allayer is looking into using other real-time operating systems to develop less expensive versions.

"VxWorks is like the Cadillac of the industry, but in some applications, you might not need all the features," Wong said. "We want to look into doing a low-cost, lower-feature [version] with other operating systems."

Future RoXMan releases will add such features as Layer-3 switching, Wong said.

On the hardware side, Allayer's target market is likely to divide into higher- and lower-end camps, Wong said. Future generations of the AL300 product line will take that split into account.

In part, that means Allayer will have to up the number of ports it can support. The AL300A can manage 32 Ethernet ports on its own, or more than 200 ports in stacked configurations, "but compared to the Cisco solution or the Lucent solution, it's still a lower port count," Wong said. Any higher-end package "has to be more scalable and more comprehensive, with more features integrated."

The AL300A chip, already shipping in volume, collects data from the network across an Allayer proprietary bus — either the 9.6-Gbit/second RoX bus or the 12.8-Gbit/s RoX-II. Pertinent information includes the status of each port or figures such as the number of packets sent or received by each of the ports.

The AL300A reports its data to a workstation using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or the remote monitoring specification (RMON) format.

The RoXMan software package — and by default, the AL300M offering — is in beta test and is due to debut at the end of October. For now, buyers need to develop their own software to take advantage of the AL300A's network management capabilities. That process could take more than a year, Wong said, a factor that Allayer expects will be a selling point for the AL300M.

The price tag for the AL300M software-plus-chip package is $35 in quantities of 1,000. RoXMan software is designed to be embedded in flash memory and operates with a variety of microprocessors.