With the ever-increasing pervasiveness of the Internet and its stringent performance requirements, network system designers have begun utilizing specialized chips to increase the performance of network functions. To increase performance, many more advanced functions, such as traffic shaping and policing, are being implemented at the network interface layer to reduce delays that occur when these functions are handled by a general-purpose CPU. While some designs use ASICs to handle network functions, many system designers have moved toward using programmable network processors due to their increased flexibility and lower design cost. In this paper, we describe a code generation technique designed for the Agere Payload Plus network processor. This processor utilizes a multi-block pipeline containing a Fast Pattern Processor (FPP) for classification, a Routing Switch Processor (RSP) for traffic management and a third block, the Agere Systems Interface (ASI), which provides additional func...
Steve Carr, Philip H. Sweany