NPEngine™ Ultrahigh-Speed, Low-Power-Consumption TCP/IP Processing Engine

In future ultrahigh-bandwidth networks, the increase of network processing load on CPUs will be perceived as a problem. Toshiba has developed a hardware-based network processing engine called NPEngine™, which enables high-speed TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) processing with very low power consumption.

A hybrid processing architecture in which data packets are processed by the hardware and other control packets are processed by software (host CPU, etc.) reduces the gate count. In addition, a direct data transfer technology eliminates the memory copy operation that has been a bottleneck in conventional systems, improving processing efficiency. NPEngine™ can achieve a TCP/IP throughput of about 1 Gbit/s with a system clock frequency of only 66 MHz, making it 10 times more power-efficient than a conventional software-based system. It can also achieve double the throughput with about half the gate count compared with a competitor’s hardware-based system.

We plan to implement this system as a communication platform technology by further improving its throughput and adding support for more network protocols to be used in a wide range of networked equipment.

CPU: Central processing unit

Outline of packet receiving processing by NPEngine™