What was I thinking?
I joined, with the help of a friend from IMC/Xylan who'd landed a job there, to be an Apps Support Engineer for their existing NPU and Intelligent Fabrics products. Should have been a nice quiet 9-5 job just to conserve my savings which is what I told them I was looking for at the interview.
The NPU was a nice interesting chip. It was from a Vitesse acquisition back in 2000 of Sitera. In fact, Vitesse spending over a billion dollars on Sitera and Xaqti, within a few months in 2000, was one of the exciting motivational news articles stuck up in the lunch-room back at IMC, engineers at $10M/head was the quick exit goal back then.
Vitesse had killed NPU development and RIF most of Sitera back in 2003 and was supporting exisiting design wins only with no support staff. I could find no evidence of Xaqti at Vitesse when I was there and there were only four people left from the Sitera days. It was sad for me to interact with some of the customers we'd talked to at IMC who'd taken the "safe" route with Vitesse. Here they were 3 years later talking to me again, still struggling to get to production with chips which Vitesse was no longer actively supporting, so the job was pretty thankless.
On the intelligent switch fabric it was the same story though if these were the chips we'd been competing with at IMC they were more disappointing. These were the Gigastream products, a Vitesse invention, which perhaps explains the absence of Xaqti. Vitesse was still producing extant roadmap devices and has plans for future ASI based devices. I took interest in their SPI-4.2 interface extension of their existing CSIX based Gigastream product but it turned out to have some architectural flaws as an extension product for existing customers and the execution of the implementation had some kinks as well.
Although I was taken on as an apps engineer and my job included doing this for the above chips, the group I was working in intended mainly to use me in their future products design, which is a new set of ASI based switches and bridges.
In the middle of transitioning to this work Vitesse RIF'd everyone I was working both with and for and then a whole bunch of people also left. Given this writing on the wall, and that a company I'd been talking with before joining Vitesse came back to talk to me about the same time, I also decided to leave. This was not without some regret as I'd just started to get involved with the ASI-Sig people and the work was potentially interesting. Six months is the shortest I've ever been with any company in my life.