JANUARY 27th, 2005

Netlogic’s Revenue Jumps Over 250 Percent

NetLogic Microsystems, a company that has forged content addressable memory technology into a line of  intelligent line network processors, reported that its revenue for the year ended December 31, 2004 increased 253 percent over last year.  For the fourth quarter, revenue increased 182 percent over the fourth quarter in 2003.  Sales for 2004 reached $47.8 million.  The company currently has cash and cash equivalents on hand of about $41.4 million.

Content Addressable Memory chips, or CAM, were originally used as a building block for microprocessors. Here, they were first used as the basic component of the microprocessor's memory management unit (MMU).  CAMs are also fundamental to cache memory design. Almost all cache controllers include a cache memory, which has a fully associative CAM. One of the primary advantages of adding CAM memory to a system is that it will improve the overall system data transfer memory rate.

As the cost of silicon has declined, CAMs have become more practical to produce as stand-alone memory chips and to include on-chip. Traditionally, the limitation of CAM has been its high cost. This was because of the silicon area required for a CAM memory cell.

Today, CAMs are referred to as either CAM SRAMs or network search engines. This is because a CAM chip is primarily memory cells, like a SRAM, but the main application is in networks to search for address matches.