NPEngine™ Ultrahigh-Speed, Hardware-Based Network Processing Engine with Low Power Consumption

Toshiba has developed a hardware-based network protocol processing engine called NPEngine™, which realizes ultrahigh-speed Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) processing with very low power consumption.

Due to its hybrid architecture that reduces the gate count and a direct data transfer technology that eliminates the bottleneck of data transfer, NPEngine™ configured for Gigabit Ethernet can achieve an 80 times higher TCP/IP throughput at the same frequency or 1/20 the power consumption at the same throughput compared with a typical 32-bit embedded CPU^(*), and a three times higher throughput with 1/2 the gate count compared with a conventional hardware-based engine. In addition, NPEngine™ configured for 10 Gigabit Ethernet can also achieve 10 Gbits/s throughput with an operating frequency of only 100 MHz.

NPEngine™ has been applied to the VIDEOS neo™ (ON-AIR MAX FLASH for global markets) flash-memory-based video server for broadcasting systems, contributing to the reduction of its power consumption and improvement of its data transfer performance.

(*) CPU: central processing unit

Top view and internal structure of NPEngine™ burned-in FPGA