to the Terms of Use as given at the website. THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY: DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND THE CONVERGENCE NETWORKS THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY 29 Semiconductor technology advances Need for complex, faster & powerful less expensive chips chips Computer operating systems, proliferation applications for PC & embedded Need for powerful network Demanding applications Client- ppocessors server model Complex multimedia fast network equipment Need for LAN & WAN connectivity Converged broadband Internet & network Telecom deregulation technologies Packetized telephony & multimedia FIGURE 1.1 An overview of the historic evolution process in the comput- ing and networking industries over the last 30 years. One can easily see the major external and internal factors that converge to create the need for sophis- ticated and powerful network processors in the future. been made possible thanks to the spectacular progress that we have witnessed over the same period of time in semiconductor engineering and the commensurate advancement in operating systems and software technologies. The insatiable demand for communications bandwidth and fast response time in a real-time setting that many new applications require are at the heart of the unprecedented network growth of the last several years. The convergence of these growing networks for the very high-speed transmission of voice, multimedia, and data, coupled with the deregulation of telecommunications in many parts of the world and the global de facto acceptance of packet-based technologies, requires a new breed of extremely fast and efficient semiconductor devices. These devices, which are the basis of network switching/routing equipment, will process the expected fast and at times very heavy traf- fic without compromising on the QoS expectations of network users. This new generation of advanced microchips is now known under the generic name of network processors. In the next chapters, we will look under the hood of network processors. We will learn what the