 to propose to entice our designer to their platform. However, the solidity of the development environment and 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. SYSTEMS ENGINEERING ISSUES 346 NETWORK PROCESSORS tools, especially the software engineering environment/language/tools and context whose metrics show undisputable economies of development, end up tilting the balance. Our designer tells his or her colleagues that code won't be written in plain vanilla C or C+ + or even RISC assembly and that a short training will be needed in FPL and other advanced development tooling to make things happen. This seems like a reasonable investment with a significant and quantifiable return. Preliminary Design Outlook Requirements will need to be created for the various cards. If cards can be bought already with these specs, all the better. That saves time and money. Otherwise, the corresponding card design proposed by the vendor will have to be implemented by our designer's organization in new and perhaps custom- size cards that fit the available slots. Our system designer first considers that the 19-inch rack will allow 12 slots. He or she can plug one full-size card or two half-size cards in each slot. The midplane and the backplane issues must also be considered as we advance in the conceptualization of the design. For proof-of-concept and evalu- ation steps, a designer would ask the vendor (in this case, Agere) if they have something to propose for this situation. The short answer is yes, because the company offers a full-fledged integrated devel- opment environment called Festino, which could be of help. In reality, however, this is not an opti- mized environment, and customers will want to ultimately design their own system that offers configurations that are not possible or available with Festino. We will not deviate from our subject though. Our 