About Silicom

Silicom Ltd. operates as an industry-leading provider of high-performance networking and data infrastructure solutions. The company's innovative solutions for high-density networking, high-speed fabric switching, offloading and acceleration, which utilize a range of cutting-edge silicon technologies as well as FPGA-based solutions, are ideal for scaling-up and scaling-out mobile and cloud infrastructures. The company's products target major Telcos and Mobile operators, Telcos and Mobile Equipment vendors, Cloud players, Networking appliances vendors, service providers and OEMs as components of their infrastructure offerings. Products The company's products consist of: Server network interface cards (Server Adapters) - These adapters are used mostly in networking appliances which are used both in the Cloud (including public cloud and On Premise cloud) and in the Edge. Smart Cards - Intelligent and/or programmable cards, with features such as encryption, Time Synchronization, acceleration, data compression, redirection and switching, packet processing, time stamping, packet capture solutions, ultra-low latency solutions, and other offloading features. These products are used mostly inside servers which are a part of Cloud and Enterprise Data centers or inside Distributed Units and Central Units which are a part of mobile infrastructures. Smart Platforms - (Edge Products) - including virtualized Customer-Premises Equipment (vCPE) and universal Customer-Premises Equipment (uCPE) (together, CPE), Edge devices for SD-WAN, SASE, Telco dedicated routers and NFV deployments. Server Adapters The company has developed a line of products for the server networking industry, which facilitates interaction between servers and switches, allowing them to communicate with each other through a larger number of ports and with higher performance than their original manufacturer designed capabilities. The company's designs have resulted in powerful products that allow server-based systems to fully exploit the high speed potential of 1/10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet. The products have either one, two, four, six, or eight ports, which plug into servers which need to have such capabilities. Some of these products include bypass functionality which allows continuation of traffic even when the server carrying the card is failing. Smart Cards The company's Smart Card products include smart server adapters, such as redirector and switching cards, with and without x86 CPU; encryption and data compression hardware acceleration cards; FEC (Forward Error Correction) acceleration and offloading cards; Time Synchronization cards; and FPGA based cards. The company's redirector and switching cards improve performance by enabling switching fabric on a network interface card (NIC) while (in some cases) providing separate data path and management path for the switching fabric and sometimes eliminating the need for a Top Of Rack switch within the Cloud; enabling traffic filtering in order to reduce the amount of traffic received by the server, limiting it to only essential traffic for the server CPU, and consequently improving server performance; load-balancing between external servers and/or CPUs and/or CPU cores increasing the efficiency of the server; and offloading some of the server CPU tasks to the CPU and/or the switch on the NIC. The company's product line of high-performance encryption cards is designed to improve the throughput of servers with respect to which the traffic into and from them requires encryption or decryption. The products improve the performance of such servers by independently executing encryption tasks, thereby accelerating the encryption process and freeing the CPUs of such servers for other activities. This product line can off-load not only encryption functionality, but compression functionality as well. The market need for compression off-load was previously limited to some content delivery and WAN optimization networking applications; however, such compression off-load is now becoming increasingly important in the storage market especially within the Big-Data area, which is the market sector that is the primary target of this functionality. The company's FEC cards offload the Forward Error Correction tasks that are supposed to be carried out by the CPU of the Distributed Unit within 4G/5G mobile deployments, in order to allow for better performance. Such performance is more necessary in the 5G space, due to the higher bandwidth, and additional calculations and processing that need to occur at the edge, while at the same time more Radio Units are required to be attached to each DU. Therefore, it is essential to offload the FEC task from the main CPU onto a card. The company's Time Synchronization cards provide a solution for the 4G/5G deployment time synchronization requirements. In 4G, when the quantity of edge compute units was relatively small and most of the computation was done in the core or back haul, the solution for time synchronization was based on external switching units which included the time synchronization mechanisms. Such solutions are very expensive. In 5G, where both the quantity of Distributed Units is increasing and the requirements for time synchronization are becoming more complex, there is a need for a different solution and its solution incorporates the full features required for time synchronization on a card which is also a NIC. The company has built a number of variants of itsTime Synchronization cards, which address various numbers of ports (up to 12), as well as various speeds. The company's FPGA based cards are divided between two families of cards, based on the world's largest providers of such FPGA components: AMD and Intel. The company's Xilinx based cards are sold mostly in the Packet Capturing market and towards the High Frequency Trading market, or HFT market. For the Packet Capture market, it sells cards which include its IP for Packet Capturing. For the HFT market it sells mostly naked cards which do not include any software code other than the code which is required by its customers in order to add their own code to the cards. For some of its Xilinx based cards, the company provides a framework which it calls Packet Mover. Such framework allows the customer to add to the FPGA its own application, while the various interfaces are already a part of the framework, providing optimized solutions for low latency, throughput and speed. The company's Intel based FPGA cards are a result of a close relationship with Intel over the past few years, during which it has engaged in co-development and co-marketing activities with Intel. As a result of such cooperation, the company has a variety of Intel based FPGA Smart Cards addressing mostly the mobile infrastructure market and the cloud. Such cards include a variety of mechanisms making them suitable for these markets, beginning with Inline Standard NIC on top of the FPGA facilitating immediate integration with virtual operating systems, FEC and Compression offloading, time synchronization, 5G DU shells, and UPF (User Plan Functionality) shell. Smart Platforms The company's Smart Platform products are used at the Edge as CPEs (including also uCPEs and vCPEs), which are used by Telcos, Cloud Players, service providers and Application vendors (OEMs) to provide a variety of services to their customers. These are full computing platforms in a networking intensive environment and many of the technologies incorporated into these platforms are similar to those incorporated into its Server adapters and Smart cards products. The company's products include an entry level of very low end IoT devices, going through typical branch/CPE units and up to rack mounted devices targeting large scale branches. The main application for which the company's CPE/Edge devices are used is SD-WAN, for which most of its systems have been deployed. The devices are also frequently used to provide SASE, NFV, Telco dedicated routers and other such services. The company's capabilities within the Edge world include modular approach and secured management features, as well as customized designs, to help the customer achieve its required challenging performance, data volume and infrastructure-scale-up goals. The company's Smart Platforms products offer reliability and robust performance, addressing challenges of SD-WAN and other network functions integration and deployment. The company also sells Smart Platforms which consist of a combination of all product families in a single product. An example of such integration is its IBS (Intelligent Bypass Switches), which combine functionalities, as well as design elements from each of its Server Adapters, its Smart Cards and its Smart Platforms. Marketing Channels The principal market sectors for the company's products are providers of applications on Network appliances, including mostly SD-WAN, Cyber Security and Application Delivery applications; Telcos / Carriers / service providers deploying CPEs/Edge for SD-WAN, SASE and NFV; Mobile Operators/Telcos/Carriers deploying 4G/5G infrastructure; and The Cloud. The company's main business model for its line of products is called the Design Win Model. Patents and Licenses In 2010, the company filed a patent application with the United States Patents and Trademarks Office, or the USPTO, for the 'Server-Based Network Appliance'. On June 12, 2012, the company was issued patent No. 8,199,523 entitled 'Server-Based Network Appliance' from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which relates to a server-based network appliance in which a computer motherboard is mounted in a case with the bus slots of the motherboard adjacent to the rear side of the case. On September 16, 2013, the company acquired all of the intellectual property related to the unique Virtualization Off-Load Engine developed by Net Perform Technology, Ltd., a privately held company registered in Hong Kong, China. Despite perceived exclusive access to this product, and its best efforts during the acquisition process to secure the same, internal or external parties may assert a claim of infringement regarding such intellectual property. On February 8, 2015, the company filed a patent application in the USPTO with respect to Hybrid Networking Application Switch. On January 2, 2018, the company was issued patent No. 9,858,227 entitled 'Hybrid Networking Application Switch' from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patent relates to a unique solution for combining functionalities of a rack mounted networking switch and a rack mounted server into a single rack mounted enclosure comprising a hybrid networking application switch or an accelerated hybrid networking application switch. Competition With respect to Server Adapters, the company's main competitors are Nvidia, Intel, and Broadcom. In the Smart Cards products sector, the company's competition is fragmented, and differs with respect to the specific solution being offered by it. In this sector, Marvel, Nvidia, Netronome, Napatech, Molex, Lanner and Caswell compete with certain of the company's Smart Cards. In some cases of FPGA based cards, Intel and AMD also compete with the company's Smart Cards, however, as with the Server Adapters space, they target mostly the biggest accounts and only with mainstream products while for other accounts they cooperate with it. In the Smart Platforms products sector, the company's main competitors are Caswell, Lanner, Advantech and Nexcom. Research and Development The company's research and development expenses included US$ 20,563 thousand. History Silicom Ltd. was founded in 1987. The company was incorporated under the laws of the state of Israel in 1987.