NVIDIA Corporation on Friday reiterated its commitment to broadening its product portfolio with products not directly related to the company’s graphics business by acquiring a start-up dealing with TCP/IP processing solutions.

The Santa Clara, California-based today announced that it has acquired the technology assets of iReady Corp., a provider of high performance TCP/IP and iSCSI offload solutions. The assets include intellectual property, patents, and patent applications. A core group of iReady engineers has accepted positions at NVIDIA.

Privately-held iReady’s patented Ethernet technologies provide highly scalable, full transport offload for ultra-high-performance Ethernet networking. 

Even though NVIDIA specializes on graphics processors, the company has been pretty successful with its core-logic chips for mainboards recently. The company’s latest product in the field – the nForce3 250Gb for AMD64 processors – provides integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller, which, the company believes, is the fastest GbE solution in the world. Additionally, NVIDIA offers special firewall technology with its latest core-logic products.

Terms of the agreement were not announced.