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networkZONE Products for the week of September 25, 2006
IDT Says…
IDT's Application-Optimized Network Search Accelerator
Enables Scalable Lookups for Bay Microsystems 40-Gbit/s Chesapeake Network
Processor
IDT has announced its application-optimized network search accelerator was selected by Bay Microsystems as the packet header processing solution of choice for its recently announced Chesapeake Network Processor. Widely surpassing its network search engine cousins, the IDT 75S10000A delivers an unprecedented search rate of one billion searches per second - an order of magnitude greater performance than previous generation solutions - facilitating Bay's support of enhanced triple play services and future 100G Ethernet networks. The IDT network search accelerator is designed to cost-effectively enable high-performance, low-power packet processing for Bay Microsystems' fully-programmable 40G line-rate network processor and traffic manager. The first "fourth generation" network search solution commercially available, it enables enterprise, and carrier switch and router developers to create highly differentiated systems by accelerating and offloading critical search functions. In turn, this provides more headroom for value-added services, such as variable QoS for video, voice, data and security, access control lists, secure data transactions, and billing applications.
The companies have been engaged since the initial specification phases of their respective devices in order to ensure maximum performance and seamless interoperability of the combined solution. The new IDT network search accelerator works synergistically to offload classification and forwarding lookups, helping Chesapeake realize its industry-leading 40Gbit/s performance. It allows Chesapeake to provide superior performance capable of delivering complex IPv6-based tunneling services at line rate by providing a double data rate (DDR) interface, which maximizes the available search bandwidth, coupled with a new and highly unique architecture optimized for complex IPv6 policy lookups. In response to strict system-level availability and uptime requirements from leading service providers, the IDT 75S10000A implements enhanced error detection and correction to ensure the data integrity of the integrated TCAM array while providing the most reliable search solution in the market.
"When evaluating network search solutions, IDT was the only vendor capable of supporting Chesapeake's raw 125G performance. The collaboration of our Chesapeake network processor and the IDT network search accelerator empowers network OEMs to rapidly develop a new generation of multimedia-centric network equipment for the broadband market," said Charles Gershman, Bay Microsystems' founder, president and CEO. "Our ongoing collaboration with IDT will further advance broadband network system design while enabling our customers with highly integrated and optimized solutions for their converged voice, video, data and multimedia applications."
IDT offers a production-ready control plane library for the network search accelerator, which provides optimal table management for databases. The network search accelerator also comes with additional development tools that facilitate easy programming and early testing, reducing cost, speeding time-to-market, and ultimately protecting the end-user software investment. Bay Microsystems further enables designers with an integrated approach to building networking applications, incorporating IDT 75S10000A support within Chesapeake's Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which is an integral part of Lighthouse, Bay's comprehensive development tool suite.
"Together, IDT and Bay Microsystems are delivering an integrated packet processing /search solution that allows our mutual customers to focus their development efforts on efficiently building differentiating features on top of this platform and ultimately, to win in their markets," said Derek Dicker, co-general manager for the IDT IP co-processor division. "The IDT network search accelerator is not only the fastest and most reliable network search solution available today, but it is a low-power solution optimized for IPv6-enabled, triple play networks."
IDT Network Search Accelerators
The IDT network search accelerator assists packet header processing with
industry leading performance and service capabilities at wire speed. Enabling
next-generation networking equipment to work faster, smarter and more efficiently
and manufactured on the TSMC 90 nm process technology, the IDT search accelerators
process complex IPv6 policy lookups at 40 Gbits/s throughput and beyond.
With integrated error correction code to improve data integrity and system
uptime, the network search accelerators accelerate packet header classification
and forwarding in core, metro and access networks.
analogZONE Says . . .
IDT's strategic pairing of its latest search engine with Bay's Chesapeake's network processor/traffic manager (reviewed here May 2006) is an interesting response to the consolidation that's going on in the networking IC industry. By tightly coupling these two products, both companies have leveraged each other's technical expertise, development tools, and market clout to effectively go toe-to-toe with the "big dogs" in the industry. But since I don't know diddly about marketing, I'll try to stick to the technical details that the release above managed to miss.
The IDT 75S10000A was designed to hook up directly to the dual 250-MHz DDR 80-bit look-aside interfaces of Bay's 40G network processor/traffic manager. It takes the compute-intensive classification and forwarding tasks off the processor's hands to let it work at the full bandwidth of its 50 Gbit/s SPI-5 system interface even with lots of deep packet inspection and classification going on.
This new generation of TCAM-based accelerators incorporates advanced table management schemes that allow quicker internal search speeds. To match the data rate of the faster core, IDT's search request bus uses a pair of 250-MHz DDR memory interfaces which can deliver up to 1Gsearches/s. This first product in the new family has a 128 k x 80 capacity, so some applications will have to take advantage of its enhanced serial-cascade capability to support larger search spaces. Instead of the parallel bus interface used on earlier models the new device uses a serial daisy chain to stitch TCAMs together. There is a small latency penalty of around 25 ns for each stage of the daisy chain, but it should be much more tolerable in most applications than the slow-down that occurred when you hung too many devices (sometimes this meant two) off the old-style parallel interface. Another distinct improvement is the wider 80-bit search key which supports more efficient processing of IPv6 traffic. Search terms can be passed in 80-bit chunks across the dual DDR interfaces to enable efficient 320-bit five-tuple lookups using only two 160-bit transfers.
In keeping with Bay's philosophy of telco-grade reliability, the IDT 75S10000A incorporates on-bus parity checking and in-core error correction coding (ECC). Both parity and ECC results are delivered to an on-chip FIFO for easy access by the host system. Unlike the Chesapeake processor's ECC scheme which actually adds extra bits on bus, the IDT design uses in-core logic. IDT says that it adopted this approach because it does not interfere with search speed. Since I'm not an expert in TCAM bus architectures, I'll have to take their word for it unless one of our readers can supply some better explanation.
The speed at which this critter can do searches is truly amazing but you should understand how IDT derives its claim to be able to support 1 Gsearch/s. The big speed-up is due to the fact that the new architecture can support up to four simultaneous searches using the same key or parts of it as opposed to two parallel operations on the last series. This means that if you want to get the full advertised bandwidth, you'll have to be searching four separate spaces with some variant or portion of the same search term. You should also calibrate your expectations with the fact that, like any TCAM, actual throughput varies by application and how many lookups a particular type of operation requires. Nevertheless everything I was able to learn from my briefing indicates that it can actually support the 100 Gbit/s worth of Ethernet traffic processing that Bay claims it can, as long as it's used primarily in applications involving simple forwarding of long packets. Of course, the Chesapeake's SPI-5 network interface only supports 50 Gbit/s worth of capacity, but that's another story.
In addition to the glue-free interface that's optimized for the Chesapeake's look-aside port, both chips enjoy a well-integrated set of development tools that complement the basic joint reference design. Bay has integrated IDT's development tools into its development suite so that there aren't any hidden surprises or disconnects between the reference design, the code or the development suite. It's nice to see such a complementary partnering that will help give one of my favorite network processors more market traction, not to mention sell a whole lot of IDT TCAMs. I have not personally used any of the development tools, but if they are as seamless as advertised, this is a model teaming strategy that other mid-sized networking chip maker should emulate to avoid getting steamrollered by the bigger companies in this time of consolidation.
The only other thought I'll leave you with is that while this product is being pushed specifically for use with the Bay processor, its interface is relatively straightforward, other than the speed at which they run. This means that it should easily lend itself to other applications with some of the other packet processing silicon on the market today, or even as an adjunct to a custom design implemented as an ASIC or, more likely, an FPGA.
The IDT 75S10000A 128Kx80 TCAM is sampling now and is priced at $200 in 1000-piece lots. Production is slated for late Q1 2007. While IDT prefers to keep the details of future products confidential for the moment, I would expect bigger devices starting to sample a bit later in 2007.
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