ww.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. Source: NETWORK PROCESSORS CHAPTER 8 MOTOROLA'S C-PORT™ FAMILY OF NETWORK PROCESSORS Motorola has followed a two-pronged approach into the network-processing arena. At the top of their line, they offer the C-Port family of network processors and traffic managers, which we will review in this chapter. At the lower end of the spectrum, Motorola offers the PowerQUICCTM architecture, which is based on the company's original and very successful product recipe of including a very com- mon central processing unit (CPU) in the same chip die (such as a member of the 68000 or the PowerPC families) with Ethernet or other networking and communications interfaces. The latter fam- ily has earned a tremendous amount of business for the company in the local area network (LAN) and access equipment industry, effectively propelling the company to an undisputed leadership position for communications processors; however, this same family cannot technically approach the require- ments of the high-speed, heavy-duty-performance network processing that we study in this book. Therefore, we will not cover it here. Of course, Motorola quickly realized the limitations that its PowerQUICC architecture would experience when it dealt with edge and especially core networks. This is why they decided to acquire a promising Massachusetts startup called C-Port a few years ago. Since then, the company has been developing and introducing new products in the network-processing market. They have preserved the same brand name. C-PORT: THE BIG PICTURE The C-Port family is composed of mainly three network-processor chips: the C-3e, the C-5, and the C-5e. The C-3e is a fully programmable 3 Gbps throughput network processing unit (NPU) with pro- grammable interfaces along with integrated Ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) controllers (10/100/1000) and Synchronous Optical NetworklSynchronous Digita