History
One of the first patents in this technology, for UDP offload, was issued to Auspex Systems in early 1990 ) whose founder Larry Boucher and a number of Auspex engineers went on to found Alacritech in 1997 with the idea of extending the concept of network stack offload to TCP and implementing it in custom silicon. They introduced the first parallel-stack full offload network card in early 1999 and the company’s SLIC (Session Layer Interface Card) was the predecessor to its current TOE offerings. Alacritech holds a number of patents in the area of TCP/IP offload.
By 2002 as the emergence of TCP-based storage such as iSCSI spurred interest it was said that "At least a dozen newcomers, most founded toward the end of the dot-com bubble, are chasing the opportunity for merchant semiconductor accelerators for storage protocols and applications, vying with half a dozen entrenched vendors and in-house ASIC designs."
In 2005 Microsoft licensed Alacritech's patent base and along with Alacritech created the partial TCP offload architecture that has become known as TCP chimney offload. TCP chimney offload centers on the Alacritech "Communication Block Passing Patent". At the same time, Broadcom also obtained a license to build TCP chimney offload chips.
Read more about this topic: TCP Offload Engine
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