Entridia Recruits Engineers at UCI

UC Irvine is becoming the latest hot spot for finding good communication-chip engineers.

Powerhouse firms Broadcom Corp. of Irvine and Conexant Systems Inc. of Newport Beach recruit heavily from there. So does Entridia Corp., the promising start-up chip developer based in Irvine.

Launched in 1997, Entridia was founded by five graduate students from UCI’s school of engineering. Today, 20 of its 48 employees--all of whom are engineers--are former Anteaters.

“It’s become an amazing, untapped resource of talent,” said Terry Holdt, chairman and chief executive of Entridia. “Everyone else is running to Stanford. There’s a lot of very talented people right here in Southern California.”

That’s important for the young firm, which has jumped into the hyper-competitive market of making high-speed computer networking chips. The company recently snagged $10 million in funding--$7.5 million from Conexant--and wooed Holdt away from Silicon Valley consumer-electronics giant S3 Inc.

“We hope to serve some of the same customers as Conexant,” Holdt said. “With our family of products, we’ll help them expand their market reach. And their investment will help us expand and create new technological and business opportunities.”

Entridia is nestled in new offices at the University Research Park next to UCI’s campus, with pictures of its chip hanging proudly on the wall. Entridia makes computer routers, the devices that control data traffic on the Internet and other Internet Protocol network connections.

Routers help solve a key problem in today’s Net-reliant world: Too much information is speeding along computer networks worldwide, creating traffic jams. That can mean everything from minor delays for a Web page to pop up, to huge gaps and lags in telephone calls on the Net.

This perpetual threat of data gridlock, which has become critical during the last few years of the Internet explosion, has launched an intense and contentious race to fix the problem. And Entridia promises its Wisper products--or Wire-Speed Edge routers--are part of that solution.

Poised to announce customer deals, Entridia officials say they expect to start shipping the Wisper by the first quarter of 2000.