Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Cypress Semiconductor | Subject: NSE10000 and NSE20000
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 23 May 2002
Top-end network search engines aid
infrastructure
New from Cypress Semiconductor, the Ayama family of network search engines (NSEs) is optimised for multiprotocol packet classification and forwarding.
New from Cypress Semiconductor, the Ayama family of network search engines (NSEs) is optimised for multiprotocol packet classification and forwarding The NSE10000 and NSE20000 versions of this family are designed to enable network infrastructure vendors to rapidly deploy equipment that supports complex network processing capabilities with maximum design flexibility and minimum time to market
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 9 Jul 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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The NSE10000 line is targeted at customers who use custom ASIC network processors while the NSE20000 line is designed for customers using commercial network processors from companies such as Intel, AMCC, Motorola, IBM, and Vitesse.
The Ayama NSE10000 line features the CYNSE10512, an ultra-high-density 512K IP entry (18Mbit) NSE with high performance (233 million searches per second) and low power.
The NSE10000 is an ideal solution for applications that require large routing tables and wirespeed packet processing.
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"Cypress' new Ayama family of NSEs is well suited for next-generation network processing subsystems", said Jag Bolaria, Senior Analyst at The Linley Group.
"The issues they address are speed and complexity.
Being able to accomplish deep packet processing at 10Gbit/s and beyond is a major challenge.
At 233 million searches per second (MSPS), Cypress's CYNSE10512 more than meets that challenge.
It promises to be the best performing NSE in the market".
"Today's network design is becoming problematic due to the intersection of three market trends", said Christopher Norris, Vice President of Cypress's Data Communications Division.
"The number of network nodes is rapidly increasing, line rates are quadrupling, and data services that are dependent on guaranteed qualities of service (QoS) are quickly being deployed.
These three trends have resulted in the need for faster, more complex searches on higher capacity databases.
Our Ayama NSE family provides two complementary approaches to solving these problems".
The rapid increase in network nodes is due to the explosive growth of Internet traffic, which has created the need to support very large routing tables.
The quadrupling of line rates from 2.5 to 10Gbit/s has made the total time available to process a data packet decrease by a factor of four from 128 to 32ns.
The rapid deployment of services that require QoS, billing on a per-use basis, and security for customers' confidential information is driving the need for multiple lookups per packet.
This requires networking infrastructure equipment to support complex, deep packet processing at wire speeds of 10Gbit/s and beyond.
NSEs have the unique ability to efficiently search very large entry databases multiple times in nanoseconds.
Cypress effectively addresses these requirements with the Ayama family of NSEs.
These revolutionary new NSEs feature MiniKey power management and Soft Priority table management, which simplify the traditional problems of high power consumption and table management historically associated with CAM-based network search engines.
MiniKey power management reduces power by engaging only the portion of the NSE array that contains entries of interest, thereby reducing power consumption by as much as 70%.
Soft Priority table management enables dynamic prioritisation of entries for longest prefix match (LPM) in Layer 3 forwarding applications, eliminating the latency associated with routing table updates.
Both families include 512K IP Entry (18Mbit), 256K IP entry (9Mbit), and 128K IP entry (4.5Mbit) devices.
Designed to work with custom ASIC network processing ICs, the Ayama NSE10000 line includes a full ternary content-addressable memory (CAM) array with per-bit masking.
This enables it to efficiently accomplish the full spectrum of searches for applications ranging from packet forwarding to complex multiprotocol classification.
Its advanced table management feature helps maintain data integrity at wire speeds, while its unique MiniKey power management capability dramatically reduces power consumption.
"The networking market is in the midst of a revolution", said Cypress's Norris.
"With the fast growth of Internet traffic, routing tables are growing at exponential levels.
Additionally, sophisticated applications such as streaming video, virtual private networks (VPNs), voice over IP (VoIP), and others have stringent QoS and class of service (CoS) requirements that need deep packet processing.
These two factors, combined with increasingly rapid data transmission protocols such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, dictate the sort of capabilities that only Ayama NSE10000 devices can offer".
The Ayama NSE10000 line expands upon the highly successful CYNSE7000 family, with which it is backward compatible.
The NSE10000 extends Cypress's broad portfolio of NSEs to the 512K IP (18Mbit) density range.
Whereas the Ayama NSE10000 line is optimised to work with custom ASIC network processors, the Ayama NSE20000 line will provide a seamless interface to the industry's top commercial network processor units (NPUs), including those from Intel, AMCC, IBM, Motorola and Vitesse.
Using the Look Aside Bus (LA-1) interface and the AMCC XSC bus interface, the devices will seamlessly connect up to four NPUs.
The NSE20000 line includes all the capabilities of the NSE10000 such as very high density, fast performance, low power consumption, and sophisticated table management.
The family will include devices in multiple densities, including 512K IP entry (18Mbit), 256K IP entry (9Mbit) and 128K IP entry (4.5Mbit).
"The Ayama NSE20000 line is perfect for the emerging commercial NPU market", said Rob Raghavan, NSE Marketing Manager at Cypress's Data Communications Division.
"As a fundamental enabler for high performance packet processing, NSEs are designed in at the very early stages of the system development cycle.
Designers who are developing a custom ASIC network processor can use an NSE10000 device to fulfill their requirements.
Designers who select a commercial NPU can use an NSE20000 device.
These two innovative NSE families provide our customers with a high degree of flexibility to design in the processing environment of their choice".
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