 NEVs are intrigued by a new technology, they often decide to invest in it by taking a minority equity position in some of their key suppliers to ensure their ongo- ing viability. In many cases, they simply decide to acquire them, thereby assuring themselves of the in-house unrestricted availability and access to the key technology and even to the design team that had created it in the first place. CLEARSPEED TECHNOLOGY On one side of the IP-licensing spectrum in network processing, we find a company with a unique and very powerful technology-ClearSpeed Technology (www.clearspeed.com) (previously known PixelFusion). ClearSpeed is a leading vendor in the network-processing IP field. This young, but prom- ising British company has introduced a modular and highly scalable architecture for realms well beyond OC-768 and 40 Gbps. In this section, we will take a closer look at the company's approach. The over- all technology trade-offs should be compared to the context of alternative network-processing archi- tectures we have seen SO far. The multithreaded array processing (MTAP) architecture rests at the heart of ClearSpeed's syn- thesizable platform. The MTAP architecture is available for licensing in either hard (synthesized against the technology library of a specific semiconductor foundry process) or soft IP (delivered in synthesizable RTL) form. It has been shown to scale to 40 Gbps and beyond. Figure 10.1 shows the principle of this architecture. Assume that the flow of information travels from left to right. The flow- through idea is immediately applicable in switching system designs, such as in line cards, as shown in Figure 10.3. The MTAP idea combines and blends some of the traditional characteristics of Single-Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), Multiple-Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD), RISC, and very long instruction word (VLIW) approaches in a clever hybrid solution. The result is a highly scalable, high-performance, low-power architecture that is very well suited for network processing. An MTAP processor i