Network Processors: Architectures, Protocols and Platforms

Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product. Explains how network processors work and provides detailed information on all major commercial architectures, from features to design considerations Network processing units (NPUs) will be the occasion of sweeping changes in the network hardware industry over the next few years. This new breed of microchip impacts chip designers like Intel, equipment vendors like Cisco, application developers like IBM and Morotola, and an army of software engineers who spent the last decade working on protocols and network management solutions.A thoroughly practical dissection of the early NPU market, this designer's guide explains how network processors work and provides detailed information on all major commercial architectures, from features to design considerations. Comparative tables are a rich source of cross-industry info. Coverage includes traffic managers, classification chips, content-addressable memories, switch fabrics, security accelerators, storage coprocessors and NetASICs.

About the Author :
Panos Lekkas has been intensely active in the industry for more than 20 years and is currently the Founder and President of Xstream Technologies LLC in Boston, Massachusetts. Lekkas is involved in advanced technology and business development in the areas of network processing, broadband optical and RF wireless communications security, and neural computing. Lekkas is known for his expert technology advisory role for both government and leading hi-tech companies, as well as for top-of-the-line investment banks and venture capital companies. His combined experience in both technology and business development worldwide has been applied to projects involving introduction of new technologies, performing due diligence process and technology evaluation for clients, as well as conducting valuation and sale of companies and technology assets to prospective corporate acquirers. His company has also been developing a series of patents and intellectural property that it licenses and it also provides turnkey solutions in projects involving communications systems analysis/simulation/development, VLSI/SOC architecture design, FPGA prototyping, and development of embedded software. Lekkas started his career as a VLSI engineer with Silvar-Lisco and he rose to supervise the company's European applications engineering group. He joined IBM in the early 1980s. Among several positions he was Leading Architect & Systems Engineer in Austin, Texas, in charge of processor and memory management architecture and he has been instrumental in IBM's successful worldwide introduction of the RISC architecture, which ultimately evolved to become the heart of the renown IBM RS/6000 supercomputers. Lekkas has held several positions in advanced technology development and technical marketing management with IBM in both the United States and Europe. After he left IBM and before starting Xstream Technologies, Lekkas has held positions as CTO & Technology Division General Manager of THLC in Marlboro, Mass., a fabless semiconductor company in the area of high-speed communications security where he built the engineering division by a series of mergers and acquisitions while hands-on leading the development of the company's highly complex ASIC product in collaboration with IBM Microelectronics; Co-Founder, President/CEO of wirelessEncryption.com Inc., a Burlington, Mass. fabless semiconductor company where he invented and started developing a patented streaming communications security technology that culminated to a multimillion dollar IPO; VP Engineering at ACI, a Hudson, Mass. fabless semiconductor company designing advanced communications ASICs; Director of Business Development with TCC, in Concord, Mass. where he further built and supervised the in-house cryptography team, participating in industry-standards bodies, and having led the product definition for systems destined for military and intelligence communications including link- and protocol-sensitive encryptors for the industry; Director of International Technical Sales & Applications Engineering with Galileo Corp. where he pioneered the introduction of their WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) and praseodymium-doped-fluoride fiber telecom amplifier communications technology and where he increased by 10 times the Japanese business of the company within two years. At Galileo he had the establishment of the company's electro-optics technologies as a de facto standard worldwide in the fields of lithography, scanning electron microscopy, and surface analysis for semiconductor equipment manufacturers and he was instrumental in the effort to diversify the fiberoptics-based coherent-imaging business division from heads-up avionics displays to medical markets that revolutionalized the ways minimally invasive surgery is conducted. Before that, Lekkas had also set up and run successfully with full P&L responsibility Galileo's European branch working closely with manufacturers of image intensifier tubes (military night-vision), large scientific/analytic instrumentation, and medical imaging systems, as well as with particle accelerator labs, space agencies and nuclear weapons labs of friendly countries. Lekkas has done his graduate research in quantum electronics at Rice University, in Houston, TX where he was a student of Nobel-laureate Professor Robert Curl. He has two graduate degrees in electrical engineering, one specialized in VLSI and semiconductor technology, and one on wireless communications with emphasis on RF microelectronics and microwave antennas. He has done his MBA work in Corporate Finance at the (KUL) Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium and he is a Professional Engineer in the European Union. Lekkas has invented and authored several US and foreign patents in the areas of communications transmission, coding, and security and he is a member of the IEEE, of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. Together with now George Washington University's Professor Randall Nichols who was a key member of one of his previous R&D teams, Lekkas has coauthored another major textbook titled Wireless Security, which was published worldwide by McGraw-Hill in December 2001. It contains a foreword written by Admiral Michael McConnell, former DIRNSA (head of the U.S. National Security Agency.) Lekkas has worked extensively in N. Europe, Japan, Middle East and Latin America and he can fluently speak and write in more than a dozen of European, Asian and Middle Eastern languages.