New Packet Forwarding Technology to Support OC-768; CAM-based Packet Forwarding Engine Will Handle 100 Million Packets per Second.
Business Wire, Jan 24, 2000 p0458
KANATA, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 24, 2000
SiberCore Technologies Inc. today announced a new technology it will use to design &uot;packet forwarding engines&uot; (PFEs) that will enable multi-gigabit and terabit routers and high-performance, multi-layer Ethernet switches. Based on an innovative new, ternary content addressable memory (CAM) architecture, SiberCore's packet forwarding engines will support high-speed, multi-protocol look-ups through Layer 7 that will provide information on quality of service (QoS) and class of service (CoS), as well as supporting Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)
The company's initial product offering is expected in the first quarter of 2000.
According to SiberCore CEO, Dr. Ken Schultz, &uot;The explosive growth of the Internet is rapidly outpacing the ability of routers and switches to keep up with the sheer volume of network traffic and address look-ups. Not only is the growth in the volume of look-ups growing exponentially. There is also rapidly increasing demand for longer addresses with more information (Layers 3 through 7, as well as IPv6) which compounds the packet forwarding problem even further.
The advent of ternary content addressable memory (CAM) has made a significant contribution to opening the packet forwarding bottleneck. Ternary memories have a &uot;don't care&uot; state that allows maskable searches. Ternary CAMs increase throughput by a factor of 5 to 10 over conventional algorithmic look-up technologies.
&uot;The number of Internet users is doubling every four months and the volume of traffic generated by the Internet is doubling every six months,&uot; Schultz explained. &uot;The conventional approach to supporting this growth is to shrink the process and turn up the clock. However, Moore's law can't keep up with Internet growth because chip densities only double every 18 months. Process shrinks are not going to get routers and switches where they need to be. The architecture needs to be radically improved.
&uot;Our new packet forwarding technology is going to radically expand the speed and efficiency of address look-ups so that switches and routers can keep up with Internet growth. It addresses several key issues. With the advent of multi-protocol switching and routing, multiple comparand word sizes are becoming mandatory in forwarding engine look-up tables. The more advanced CAMs are capable of supporting longer and even multiple words-widths, but they are extremely silicon inefficient because either the entire memory is set to a fixed width, or it is restricted to predefined width segments regardless of the comparand word sizes. If 80% of the look-ups require only 32-bit IPv4 look-up and 20% require 128-bit flow control look-up, the memory must be configured as a 128-bit memory for full speed operation. This wastes 96-bits for 80% of the searches and results in the need for more chips and/or larger memories that add substantially to board size, power consumption and system cost. In this particular example, the designer would be wasting the majority of the available memory capacity. This is a very expensive proposition.
&uot;Another real drawback to CAM performance has been the need to update addresses,&uot; Schultz explained. &uot;Using a conventional ternary CAM, the search path must be &uot;suspended&uot; whenever an address is updated. Stopping searches to update addresses bogs down the throughput, and increases the complexity of the system design. With the heat on to achieve multiple searches per OC-192 packet, systems can't afford to shut down the memory for address updates.
&uot;SiberCore's advanced, high-speed packet forwarding engine will radically increase address look-up throughput. It's more than just a CAM. It contains the logic required to prioritize packets and forward them very quickly and efficiently. It will provide a very cost effective solution and will substantially simplify router and switch design,&uot; Schultz concluded.
SiberCore has the engineering talent to make good on this promise. Dr. Schultz led the team that developed the world's first high-speed, fully parallel, multi-megabit CAM. He has kept together much of the design team that pioneered this CAM technology at Nortel Semiconductor. The company's Chief Architect and co-founder, Randall Gibson, was also involved in the development of high-speed, low-power embedded memory architectures including CAM, DRAM, SRAM, ROM and NVM, during his tenure at Nortel, culminating as manager of Nortel's Memory Development Group. SiberCore's third co-founder and head of the ASIC design team, Farhad Shafai, was the lead circuit designer for Nortel's multi-megabit CAM. And the company's Vice President of Engineering, Steve Kornachuk, architected Artisan's high speed embedded SRAM product line.
SiberCore Technologies was founded in 1998 to develop and market third generation packet forwarding solutions using CAM technology that radically increase the throughput of the Internet, and improve the performance of WAN and LAN routers and switches. The company's products promise to leapfrog networking technology so that OC-192 packet forwarding will be achievable later this year.
Company founders Dr. Kenneth Schultz, Randall Gibson and Farhad Shafai pioneered high-density, high-speed content addressable memory technology in the Embedded Memory Group of Nortel Semiconductors, during the mid-1990s. This effort resulted in the world's first 2.5 Mbit CAM. Company founders hold over 20 patents on CAM architecture, CAM design, high-speed circuit design, memory design and architecture, design for testability (DFT), layout techniques and ASIC architecture. This technology is the basis for SiberCore's high-speed packet forwarding solutions.
SiberCore Technologies is privately held and is located in Kanata, Ontario, Canada. The company's World Wide Web site is sibercore.com . Please email inquiries to info@sibercore.com. |
