higher, whether it is for the sales forces of companies who are able to consult and update secure corporate databases of inventories and orders in real time in front of their customers or for the excited Generation-Xer who engages in a multiuser video-game session with heavy animation involving three-dimensional graphics over the Internet. These new applications that provide exceptional local computing capabilities require additional 43. Henry Chang et. al, Surviving the SOC Revolution-A Guide to Platform-Based Design (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999). 44. Michael Keating and Pierre Bricaud, Reuse Methodology Manual for System-on-a-Chip Designs (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999). 45. Prakash Rashinkar, Peter Paterson, and Leena Singh, System-on-a-Chip Verification-Methodology and Techniques (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). 46. Wayne Wolf, Modern VLSI Design: System-on-Chip Design (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2002). 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. THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY: DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND THE CONVERGENCE OF NETWORKS THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY 23 transmission bandwidth compared to the past. This bandwidth was not previously available simply because the demand for it was not there. Applications drive the need. In most of these new applications, the functional specification requirements for hardware and soft- ware designers are staggering for the underlying equipment. The communications landscape is no longer what it used to be: The multimedia transmission requirements in such a realm are combined with streaming audio and video, bringing in their own ergonomic levels of acceptability. In many cases, packets now cannot be lost or discarded, as it may not be possible to recover the traffic in case 