, and switch fabrics, to propose a more or less integrated solution. Some vendors, such as EZchip or Silicon Access Networks, are funded by major industry players (in this case, IBM and Intel, respectively). In addition to being investors, these industry players have a brute interest in the startup's success-for example, IBM is EZchip's silicon foundry. On the other hand, they seemingly compete for network-processing business against the very startup they support. We will try to cover these multidimensional relationships in the appropriate chapters of the book, although we may have to mention some of these issues in this chapter. The material is organized this way because some vendors have come up with nonspectacular or nondifferentiable network-processor chips, whereas others have also come up with powerful traffic managers or switch fabrics. These chips are SO potent that they can be used as standalone traffic managers or as switch fabric solutions in tems that may end up being built with network processors from another competing vendor. SILICON ACCESS NETWORKS' iFLOW CHIPSET The iFlow chipset from Silicon Access Networks (www.siliconaccess.com) has been designed to oper- ate at speeds between 10 and 40 Gbps. The company advertises it as a 20 Gbps solution to indicate that it can handle duplex OC-192 links, unlike several other products advertised as 10 Gbps network processing units (NPUs). The iFlow chipset is made up of several products: a packet processor called iPP, a traffic manager (to be formally announced) called iTM, an accountant chip that handles statis- tics and policing called iAC, and two search engines known as the address processor (iAP), and the classifier (iCL). The family does not contain Media Access Control (MAC) controllers, framers, or switch fabrics, but industry-standard interfaces ensure the connectivity between these products from other vendors and the heart of a network-processing system that is designed around the iFlow archi- tecture. Figure 9.1 shows how the chipset can be used to