the market. Nevertheless, some of them fail to secure funding and are forced to cease operations. Nowadays, a network-processing startup must do more than just possess technology, have a prod- uct and revenue, and execute a predetermined business plan. It must secure operational funds on time and obtain actual design wins from customers who are established market players in their own mar- kets. This is difficult to accomplish since customers want to see a working product with differentiable characteristics that mean something for the customer along with a support structure, development tools, and SO on. Many customers justifiably worry whether their key suppliers will be around next year or three years down the road; therefore, they require financial robustness from the network-pro- cessing vendors in order to make a favorable business decision. As many of these young companies have taken their last breath, some of the technical material that was originally planned to be included in this chapter suddenly became nonapplicable and was omit- ted. This book intends to leave the job of passing final judgment as to who is a viable player and who is not to the rigors of the market. Consequently, we are taking the approach that we should cover as much alternative material as the scope of a textbook allows. However, it has been our intention to keep 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. OTHER NPU ARCHITECTURES 138 NETWORK PROCESSORS abreast of the rapid evolution of this market in order to ensure that the material is kept up-to-date until the book goes to press. In this chapter, we take a look over the landscape of other network-processor vendors. Some ven- dors offer interesting and innovative approaches, whereas others combine their products with other ancillary chips they have designed, such as traffic managers, classification processors