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- Network Communication
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™