Abrizio appointed Ed Priest, formerly Director of Circuits & Interconnect Technologies (CIT) at Silicon Graphics, as Director of System Design and Verification. Abrizio also appointed Peter Davies, formerly Manager of Verification, Advanced Development at Chromatic Research, as Director of ASIC Verification.

Abrizio was founded by Anders Swahn and Dr. Nick McKeown in October 1997 to be a fabless semiconductor company providing scalable terabit switching technology for voice, video, and data. The company has its technology roots in the research that Dr. McKeown did at Stanford, where he developed the TinyTera technology. The Tiny Tera project goal was to show the feasibility of a one Tbit/s switching fabric implemented in standard CMOS technology.

Abrizio has recruited four out of the five key people that were behind the Tiny Tera project. In June 1998 the company raised $6 million from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital. Prior to obtaining the venture funding the company had raised $465,000 from angels.

http://tiny-tera.stanford.edu/tiny-tera/index.html

Anders Swann, President and CEO (x-AMD)
Nick McKeown, CTO
Zubair Hussain, VP, engineering
Saroj Behera, VP, operations
Greg Watson, director ASIC architecture