Monday, June 4, 2018

Solarflare Gets New, Funding From Oak, Xilinx

Irvine-based Solarflare, which develops low latency network interface cards (NICs) said this morning that it has received a strategic investment, which was led by Oak Investment Partners and also included FPGA developer Xilinx. Financial details of that investment were not announced. According to Solarflare, it will use the new funding to expand beyond its current market. Solarflare's current products are used in low latency networking, typically used in system clustering, financial applications like electronic trading, and other areas. The company says it is now focusing on using FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) for its new products--hence the close relationship with Xilinx, one of the primary companies driving the FPGA market. Solarflare had originally developed its products using ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits), which tend to have a much longer lead time (years versus months) for product development compared to FPGA technology. Solarflare is led by President and CEO Russell Stern.