Network World - Who wants to be a Ent
The winner of Network World's inaugural "Who Wants to be an Entrepreneur?" contest says if all goes well his idea could lead to routers and other network devices costing much less and coming in smaller sizes.
Joe Pereira, a former design manager for pre-IPO semiconductor company NetLogic Microsystems, beat out 60 entrants with his concept for a content and database engine designed to take up two to 10 times less space and handle more chores than current specialty processors. His prize: $30,000 split between cash and services paid-in-kind, such as legal advice, plus exposure to a panel of judges including three venture capitalists.
Pereira, who moved from India to the U.S. in 1999 and now lives in California, says the technology he has under development would be sold as a subsystem, card or chip. The processor he has in mind "stores databases including routing tables and security rules (spam, intrusion-detection system, virus), and applies them at high wire rates," he wrote in his application. Pereira describes his vision as "improving performance and reducing cost for router, security, cache and database systems."
He says that his content and database engine, by supporting a range of processing duties, would be a cost-effective alternative to silicon designed specifically for each niche, such as processing XML data.
He estimates it would take about two months to define a processor for any particular customer and eight months to build it. He says he plans to build "a mathematically complete solution rather than [another one of] today's heuristics-based solutions."
