12 December 2003 San Jose, CA Lightwave -- EZchip Technologies (a subsidiary of LanOptics Ltd.), a fabless semiconductor company providing high-speed network processors, announced that its NP-1c 10-Gbit/sec network processor is in production. The move to production follows sampling of the NP-1c in May 2003 and testing of the device at EZchip's facilitates and by select customers.
The NP-1c marks EZchip's second-generation 10-Gigabit network processor, following the release of the NP-1 in May 2002. It has garnered 30 customers worldwide, half of which are large system vendors.
"EZchip is the only vendor in the market with a production-worthy, second-generation, 10-Gigabit network processor that provides customers with a mature, well-tested device they can move their systems to production," said Eli Fruchter, president and CEO of EZchip.
NP-1c is a single-chip 10-Gigabit seven-layer full-duplex network processor providing fully programmable packet classification, modification, forwarding, and policing at wire speed. NP-1c integrates processing and classification on a single chip, eliminating the need for CAMs and SRAMs and saving as much as 80% in chip-count, power dissipation, and cost versus alternative solutions. Network equipment based on NP-1c can gain an extended time in market by the headroom made available through the use of just four DRAM chips, the company says. New applications that often require more and larger lookup tables are supported through software updates without requiring the addition of any new hardware.
NP-1c's Layer 2-7 processing make it applicable for mainstream applications such as VPLS/MPLS/IPv4/IPv6 for the metro, edge, and core, as well as for processing-intensive Layer 7 products such as load balancing switches, storage gateways, firewalls, and other content aware devices.
The NP-1c is available now. Pricing at 10,000 units is $795.