Dado Of Ikanos: Every Available Medium, Including Fiber & Wireless

"It's all about delivering as many bits as possible," Ikanos' new chief Dado Banatao tells me. "We will create more bandwidth using every available medium." He's looking for new ways to increase performance. Ikanos is big in both ADSL and VDSL, so I asked what mix he anticipated in a few years. "We'll choose the algorithm that gives us the best performance for a given distance. ADSL, VDSL, or a new YDSL if that delivers the speed our customers' customers' - the carriers - want."

Mike Gulett, Dado's predecessor, believed Ikanos has a superior method for DSM vectoring, although he held back details until they are closer to product. Dado served with DSM inventor John Cioffi on the board at Marvell and Ikanos has a license to ASSIA/Cioffi's patents, so expect close collaboration. Vectoring is crucial now that AT&T's John Stankey has told investors vectoring will increase AT&T speeds; AT&T's U-Verse VDSL deployment was the prize that came with the Conexant purchase, but the other chip vendors are regularly flying to Texas offering deals. See AT&T Trialing 80 meg bonded for Stanley's comments. Cioffi believes that effective vectoring (DSM Level 3) requires full integration with DSM Level 1 controllers, which makes sense to me.

Dado is genial and good to talk with, but Ikanos employees can expect a demanding boss. He began as a barefoot boy speaking Itawes, a poor farmer's son.
College in the Philippines led to an engineering job at Boeing and ultimately to Stanford, where he learned about the Internet from a young Vint Cerf. His Chips and Technologies startup was perhaps the first "fabless semiconductor" shop. Back in 1985, I reported C & T's plan to revolutionize the PC business by creating the first "chipset" for the IBM PC. Growth was phenomenal, with sales quickly in the $100's of millions. It didn't come easy. "When I started out, I was literally not sleeping every night due to working and thinking," he tells The Star. "Real success comes due to hard work." His next company, S3, also did remarkably. He invested his earnings ($300M by one estimate) in venture capital. He funded and became Chairman of Marvell, which made $billions.

Banatao now has the best of toys (two jets) and no need to work so hard, but he dived in to actively manage Ikanos to ensure returns on his investment. Today's Ikanos is the successor to Conexant/Globespan/ADI/Virata and has strength in network processors as well as DSL chips. I've previously reported they were working on GPON, but wireless is a new initiative as far as I know. At Marvell, "They're hard charging, driven workaholics, and they expect their people to produce,'' Will Strauss tells Ed Robinson of Bloomberg. As we all know, the folks at Marvell went over the line with back-dated options, but I've seen no evidence that Dado played a direct role. Written by Dave Burstein


FREE sample (VDSL/ xDSL filters, Connectors, Cable & Wire harness, power supply charger)

Original Article Here