Ethernet Alliance elects Aquantia’s Kamal Dalmia to EEE marketing chair

MILPITAS, USA: Aquantia, the leading developer of mainstream 10GBASE-T PHY solutions, announced that the Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) subcommittee of the Ethernet Alliance has elected Kamal Dalmia, Aquantia vice president of sales and marketing, as its next EEE Marketing Chair.

The energy consumption by servers and data centers has been singled out as a growing concern in a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency. Data suggests power consumption doubling in the next 5 years if current trends continue. Major efforts across the industry have been launched to try to abate these trends. Providing significant power savings have become a key differentiation and a goal for all players of the ecosystem.

The Ethernet community has gathered around the development of a new standard, the IEEE 802.3az or Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) providing significant power savings through the implementation of Low-Power Idle (LPI) modes for a wide range of Ethernet transceivers.

First drafted in 2007, the Energy Efficient Ethernet standard has been the focus of intense collaboration by the IEEE 802.3az Task Force, and is now coming to final ballot during the third quarter of 2010.

“We’re on the verge of final approval and implementation of the EEE standard,” stated new EEE marketing chair Kamal Dalmia, “And before the end of 2010 we will see the first IEEE 802.3az-compliant production devices – this will give hard proof that features such as Low Power Idle Mode can in fact deliver substantial savings on energy consumption.”

Dalmia continued: “We have done two years of market education already, evangelizing the EEE standard’s benefits to device and system manufacturers, technology users, energy managers and facility planners. Now our work can turn to increasing the engagement of manufacturers and users, to ensure that EEE can deliver as much energy and cost savings as possible throughout the aggregate enterprise infrastructure industry.”

Kamal Dalmia has extensive experience in the semiconductor industry spanning three generations of Ethernet products. Prior to joining Aquantia as vice president of sales and marketing, Kamal served as vice president of marketing at Teranetics and director of marketing at Marvell.

He also led marketing teams for industry leading Ethernet transceivers and was instrumental in the success of several Gigabit, 10 Gigabit and Fast Ethernet physical layer products. He has also held management and engineering positions at Cypress Semiconductor and PMC Sierra, focusing on PHYs for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Infiniband, SONET and ATM. He holds several US patents and a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia.