a shorter time to market. Compatibility with the company's existing 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps network processors including the nPsoft Development Environment, in conjunction with support from the company's partners, enables customers to further leverage their existing investments in systems design and software pro- gramming. The company has announced that its first priority with this new technology will be a next-gener- ation, services-oriented 5 Gbps integrated NPU-traffic-management MAC solution. The intention is to enable designers to produce highly modular system designs that can support any service on any port, multiple concurrent high-value services, multiple technology capabilities, high subscriber den- sity, and revenue-generating, per-subscriber statistics. The result should be products that enable car- riers and service providers (who are the customers of the company's customers) to dramatically decrease both capital expenditures and operational expenses. SUMMARY In this chapter, we briefly reviewed AMCC's nP family of scalable network processors and discussed the main characteristics of the architecture. We also looked at other associated AMCC chips that han- dle traffic management and switch fabric issues in the framework of this complete family of inter- connecting products. AMCC has a powerful combination of having the scalability of its architecture and the extremely advantageous feature of being able to offer multiple chips to the designer of net- working equipment enabling the development of a complete solution quickly. Its solid business per- formance and robust financial health are important additional gauges of stability for customers who consider employing the company's network-processing technology into network equipment that they design. 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. AMCC nPT FAMILY OF NETWORK PROCESSORS Do