.5 illustrates this concept. Fabric scheduler Switch fabric maintains Class-based Switch Fabric Queues per output port Ingress Traffic Manager Egress Traffic Manager Sorting, Queuing and Scheduling Ingress on a Per-Flow basis Egress FIGURE 6.5 An example of switching and managing traffic with the nP family of products. (Source: AMCC) 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. AMCC nPTM FAMILY OF NETWORK PROCESSORS 100 NETWORK PROCESSORS AMCC offers several products in this realm, but we will focus on the nPX5800 switch fabric tar- geted for the area of OC-48 and OC-192 systems with a desired throughput of up to 160 Gbps. The nPX5800 switch fabric is a high-speed, scalable switching element that along with the traffic manager completes AMCC's network-processing platform. The nPX5800 implements nonblocking virtual output queuing technology to achieve 40 Gbps (20 Gbps full duplex) to 320 Gbps (160 Gbps full duplex) switching capacity. It is scalable to support up to 16 full-duplex 10 Gbps OC-192c Packet over SONET (POS), ATM, or 10-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces with a significantly lower chip count than other existing solutions. AMCC's nPX switching family offers additional future architectural scala- bility over 1.2 Tbps. For seamless platform implementations, AMCC uses its proprietary, nonblocking, QoS-enabled ViXTM interconnect bus, which eliminates the need for a high-speed memory bus and replaces it with much simpler, cheaper, point-to-point connections. This means that the switch's cost increases lin- early with the number of ports. This is unlike non-ViX architectures, where the cost increases expo- nentially. Despite its use of a proprietary in-house-developed interconnect bus, AMCC is an active participant in the Network Processing Forum (NPF) (formerly CSIX) and it is contributing toward the definition and adoption of next-generati