the interface is ensured with the network-processor chip (NP-1) on the evalu- ation board. The company will be expected to expand its development tools if it wants to address the needs of customers of the NP-2 and encompass the 40 Gbps realm. Competition seems inevitable with the development of other 40 Gbps network processor and traffic management products from companies such as Xelerated. However, the slower economy of 2002 seems to have adversely affected the car- rier investments for new equipment at the core level and has consequently kept the market emphasis on 10 Gbps and below. In late 2002, EZchip introduced its second-generation network processor dubbed NP-1c. The intention was to better target a wide range of markets and, more specifically, systems that include multi 1 Gigabit Ethernet, OC-192, 4XOC-48, and even 16XOC-12 with a single chip. The NP-1c, which is manufactured by IBM Microelectronics, is pin compatible with the first-generation proces- sor (NP-1); however, it has some striking differences. The NP-1c is built using IBM's cutting-edge Cu-11 semiconductor process, offering 0.11 line widths and therefore extremely compact density. In addition to its other benefits, this process enabled NP-1c designers to double the processing power. It extended the headroom by 80 percent while reducing the cost of ownership directly by lowering the price by 30 percent for a full-duplex 10 Gbps processor and indirectly by lowering it by 80 percent when it comes to considering a switching card's chip count and power dissipation. EZchip bases a lot of its arguments on the compelling case that IPv6 will be adopted more fre- quently in order to deal with the lack of IPv4 addresses, especially in the Far East, and to accommo- date the wireless IP networks where an IP address is needed per telephone. Since the IPv6 addresses are 16 bytes as opposed to IPv4 addresses, which are 4 bytes long, it is clear that IPv6 routing and session tables will be approximately 4 times larger than with IPv4 routers. A significant adva