ctually hits the market due to new design requirements. This means that competitor A or B will be the first to acquire and build market share. There will be a significant (often unbudgeted) extra cost that must be incurred due to all the wasted development work SO far. The reason for all this is that the product's content and functionality were not properly specified in the first place. For the boss, this usually means the market research work was not done thor- oughly, and it is, of course, the product manager's fault. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. NETWORK PROCESSORS: JUSTIFICATION 38 NETWORK PROCESSORS Product lifetimes have shrunk dramatically. Launches of new products with enhanced features every six months make other recently launched products obsolete. The industry has become extremely competitive. This year's star is next year's casualty. These factors have created a cutthroat environ- ment where the time to market is extremely important. ASICs do not fare well in this regard. THE NETWORK PROCESSORS' BREAKTHROUGH The reader must have realized that the argument SO far between the two schools of thoughts, namely, the one favoring designs around programmable off-the-shelf CPUs and the one favoring high- performance ASICs inside network devices, is a classic engineering discussion about the trade-off between flexibility and performance. Engineers are trained to recognize these dilemmas early on. They manipulate the conceptual plane of variables by making appropriate design choices and com- promises between conflicting requirements until they find the optimal combination of technologies that enable them to design and deliver products that meet performance and cost expectations. Network processors have now entered the stage as the proposed solution to this debate. Network processors are state-of-the-art semiconductor chips