Executives at Solidum, based in Ottawa and Scotts Valley, Calif., hope their prospects will rise as networks get faster, network traffic continues to grow, and quality of service and other enhancements proliferate. Solidum also has agreements with Intel Corp. and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp., which recently acquired Sitera. Building a network isn't like building a PC, Keane said. The PAX.port 1100 version planned for September will include 16 classification engines that can classify up to 16 channels of data simultaneously. The function grabbed the attention of Solidum's founders when they were working on a network processor, and they decided to become classification specialists.
Classification is application-independent.
Its function is to examine the incoming bit stream and identify packets according to policies, or sets of rules, Jenkins said. It has to operate at all layers and be able to identify protocols, priorities, and data patterns. As the processing depth increases, the number of combinations, the number of entries, and the size of the classification problem grows rapidly. Jenkins estimated that 64 1-Mbit CAM devices would be needed for classification at a processing depth of 256 bits. Nor can RISC processors effectively handle network-processing bandwidth requirements, he said.