Ever since it came out of stealth mode two years ago, Santa Clara, California-based Barefoot Networks has taken aim at shaking up the networking sector. 

Barefoot is taking on the likes of Broadcom and other traditional custom silicon application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) vendors with its programmable Ethernet Tofino switch.

Barefoot was founded in 2013 by chief scientist and Stanford University professor Nick McKeown, Chief Technology Officer Pat Brosshart and Chief Development Officer Dan Lenoski.

McKeown also was a founder of Nicera before it was sold to VMware,

"Nick came up with this idea of having a fully programmable internet switch ASIC that's not just fully programmable, but allows end users to program the data plane," said Barefoot Networks' Prem Jonnalagadda, director of product management, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "So it calls for a high level programming language that's easy to learn and easy to code in, which can be used to describe the data plane behavior of the chip."