CC as one of the leading contenders. AMCC is now able to offer the advan- tage of one-stop shopping to its customers. It covers the entire spectrum of a network equipment designer's needs from scalable OC-192 switch fabrics and NPUs all the way to transceivers and framer chips for Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) and Gigabit Ethernet realms. In this chapter, we review AMCC's nP network-processing architecture. We briefly look inside some of the company's most powerful network processors to form an impression of how AMCC's approach compares to that of other leading vendors. Finally, we discuss some of the company's other associated chips that facilitate the integration of a complete switching/routing system design by effi- ciently handling major technical challenges such as traffic management, scheduling, and the actual switching process. nPTM ARCHITECTURE: THE BIG PICTURE AMCC1 has been consistently expanding its NPU offerings by building on an underlying scalable architecture called nPTM. Although the company offers several network-processor products, we will look at only a few of their most recent and powerful ones: the nP7250, which is a network processor rated for the OC-48c realm, and the more recent nP7510, which is AMCC's flagship OC-192c net- work processor. The network-optimized instruction set computing (NISC) architecture is at the heart of AMCC's network processors. This architecture is implemented in the company's patented nPcoreTI the fun- damental engine replicating which dramatically scales the performance and bandwidth of a network processor based on the nP architecture. The company's NISC model was already developed at MMC Networks (before the company was acquired by AMCC) in response to the performance shortcom- ings of traditional reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors in the late 1990s. These short- comings were especially apparent as link speeds exponentially increased and traffic loads exploded due to increased bandwidth demand. The company estimates that with the implementat