elopment platform. Its output (the rule tables) is then loaded into the classi- fication processor, which processes the entire packet header and payload byte per byte for full wire rate classification at 10 Gbps. Interestingly, the RQDPC10G processor is fully protocol aware. As a result, it can perform Transmission Control Protocol/IP (TCP/IP) header checks and modifications on-the-fly. Conscious of competition at the lower-end of the complexity spectrum (layers 2 to 4) with TCAM- based classification solution vendors, Raqia is justifiably concentrating its marketing attention on high-complexity applications such as the following: Virus scanning (for example, on incoming e-mail). Intrusion detection. Firewall-like filtering of packets (for example, in a gateway, some incoming packets-based on specific rules-will be accepted, whereas others will be denied entry to a corporate site). In fact, the company's first product, the ReGXP2G Regular Expression Coprocessor is well tar- geted toward the IDS and web-switching realms, especially those that are based on HTTP 1.1. In the IDS case, every incoming packet must be parsed and analyzed byte per byte looking for attack sig- natures. This analysis must be performed in real time and is computationally intensive. Current IDS are implemented in software and usually monitor incoming traffic passively. Due to the heavy com- putation needed during their execution, they can only be selectively engaged periodically on some of the incoming packets. This leaves many holes continuously wide open for intrusion attacks. In some cases, they can only be engaged after an intrusion attack has been detected, which is essentially use- less. In the case of web switching involving HTTP 1.1, unlike HTTP 1.0, it not only supports multiple HTTP requests per TCP session, but it also requires that the URL parsing function inspect every incoming packet. At wire speed, this represents an unprecedented explosion of computational work- load that current software-based implementations simply cannot ha