Mellanox Technologies Ltd., the network equipment supplier currently in the process of being acquired by Nvidia Corp., today announced an acquisition of its own.

Mellanox has inked a deal to buy a Belfast-based firm called Titan IC Systems Ltd. that develops chip technology for network devices and other data center systems. The terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Titan IC has developed what is essentially an in-chip search engine that scans the data flowing through a company’s network and finds items of interest. The technology, dubbed RXP, can be used to spot malicious traffic sent by hackers trying to stage a cyberattack. RXP is also capable of speeding up analytics workloads by helping applications find important pieces of  information in data they process, like large transactions in a stream of e-commerce purchases.

Mellanox uses Titan IC’s technology to power some of the features in its BlueField line of network adapters. Buying the firm will enable Mellanox to take ownership of a key component of its product portfolio and, in the longer term, align Titan IC’s development roadmap more closely with its own. 

“There are simply some things that we couldn’t do as two separate companies that together we will be able to accomplish,“ Dror Golderberg, Mellanox’s vice president of software architecture, wrote in a blog post. “First and foremost, some development will be enabled simply as a matter of scale, focus, and opportunities for innovation.”

“Boundaries between different IP interfaces can prevent the optimization of hardware accelerators across sub-systems, and as part of a single company these boundaries will be eliminated,” Golderberg added.

The executive said Mellanox will work to apply Titan IC’s chips to use cases such as data center storage optimization, virtualization and artificial intelligence. AI is a major focus for Nvidia, which made a $6.9 billion bid to acquire Mellanox last year that’s currently undergoing regulatory review.

On its website, Titan IC lists machine learning and deep learning among the workloads that can benefit its RXP technology. The firm claims that RXP allows models to filter unnecessary information out of the data they analyze to speed up processing.

Mellanox’s purchase of Titan IC is the latest in a series of acquisitions involving major data center suppliers and niche network chip providers. In December, Cisco Systems Inc. picked up an Australian firm called Exablaze Pty. Ltd., which developed packet processing cards for the algorithmic stock trading sector. Previously, Arista Networks Inc. bought field programmable gate array maker Metamako Inc. for an undisclosed sum. 

Photo: Titan IC