 group has been put together to design and bring to market the various IBM families of network processors. In addition to being the leading captive semiconductor producer on the planet, IBM has been one of the leading network equipment manufacturers for many years, as evidenced by their NPUs. IBM tangibly implements pertinent sophisticated know-how, which con- tinues to pour out of its world-famous research teams and, more specifically, teams that are engaged in fast networking development in Yorktown Heights, New York, in Rueschlikon, Switzerland, and in Haifa, Israel. If we step back and look macroscopically at the PowerNP family, we find IBM's NPU flagship- NP4GS3-at the top of the line. NP4GS3 is also known in the industry as Rainier. The two variants of the NPe405 are available at the low end of the spectrum of IBM's NPU offer- ing. The NPe405 (dubbed H and L, respectively) network processors have embedded support for 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. IBM POWERNP TM 62 NETWORK PROCESSORS various interfaces, such as Fast Ethernet, High-level Data Link Control (HDLC), and SO on. They are focused primarily on the access equipment market and are not capable of handling very-high-speed routing/switching in a multiservice routing/switching environment like their more powerful sibling. Because the underlying architectures are different, the executable code for the NPe405 and the code for the NP4GS3 are incompatible. IBM customers using the e405 family will have a certain migra- tion path inside the e405 family as equipment performance requirements increase. This, of course, helps preserve the customer's software investment. However, we will not be expanding on this low- end product here. Interested readers can find more information about it directly from the IBM Microelectronics web site at www.chips.ibm.com. Below the NP4GS3 and