IDT network search accelerator matches Bay Micro's Chesapeake NP performance

With the advent of always-on services, HDTV, Video on demand, gaming, IPTV, Internet, etc., and the consumer there are hundreds of millions of endpoints in the network with much higher bandwidth requirements. Bandwidth requirements for service providers have increased on the order of 200x in magnitude, causing a huge upheaval in the service provider's infrastructure. The IDT announcement comes on the heels of AT&T stating that they will require 100G in the infrastructure by the end of the decade.

"IDT had the only product on the market that could meet the performance requirements that we needed," said Bill Weisinger, director of marketing and business development at Bay Microsystems. "Chesapeake achieves 122 million packets per second of sustained performance with an internal processing capacity of 125G."

The device features an 80-bit 250MHz DDR interface. The 80-bit interface provides the ability to build keys that are 80, 160, 320 and 640 bits wide enabling the handling of IPv6 policy lookups more effectively, creating a significant impact on performance. The 250 mega-search core allows for four independent searches per key--one billion searches per second (BSPS) throughput performance using the simultaneous multi-database lookup (SMDL) feature. The ECC functionality operates in the background to detect and correct errors, reporting error correction, and has no impact on the product's search performance.

"The enterprise and metro markets face several challenges in addition to obviously faster line rates and lineup of new services," said Dave Cech, IDT director of marketing for the IP Co-Processors Division. "Add services, billing and security, each requires that search keys be generated and sent to the search accelerator to be checked against a variety of existing databases."

Depending on the application and the customer requirements, as many as eight searches per packet occur to handle traffic properly, Cech further explained, creating an immense processing burden on the system. IPv6 also has a major impact. The address scheme for IPv6 is 4x longer than IPv4. Given the physical interfaces between the devices within the system, 4x more data across a data bus for processing is huge. IPv6 search keys are much longer than those used with IPv4, particularly for policy- or access-control related lookups. Supporting the same level of performance with many more users for IPv6 is a major challenge. Finally, reliability regarding service continuity--not dropping packets with such visual applications as video, and availability--high uptime and integrity are all critical.

IDT claims that the device is capable of handling 40Gbps under almost any traffic condition, and up to 100-G performance under some circumstances. Up to four searches per key, the device quadruples the number of searches performed on a per key basis. By modifying for IPv6 enables an increase of 4x in the data rate of IPv6 traffic. IDT also added EEC functionality to address reliability, availability, and continuity issues.

Collaboration between IDT and Bay is not new. Not only have they spent the past several years collaborating on this design, they have worked together with previous product generations. The companies optimized the solution from a chip as well as application perspective, to simulate, address manufacturability, and make it easier for the customer to actually develop solutions. By integrating software and development environments, end users already started developing with an integrated environment--a time-to-market advantage.

See related article: Scale network processors to 40Gbps and beyond