Abstract
In recent years, we have witnessed an explosive growth of Internet usage, which has created the demand for higher transmission speeds. The fast-growing communications market requires high performance flexible network processing platform.Since Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) can no longer meet the growing demands and rapid change in the network communications market, Network Processor (NP) technology is now challenging the preeminence of the widely used ASIC.Network Processors (NPs) provide an adaptable solution, such as high speed and programmable. So, new features can easily be added through software updates. NPs have better performance than generic processor, and better time-to-market, and time-in market than ASIC.In this paper, we designed a high speed network platform (HSNP) using Vitesse’s Prism IQ2000. In this platform, user can implement their personal network application in it. HSNP is a chasis-based platform which supports the abilities of programmable, hot swap, extendable, and etc. The performance of the HSNP is also tested and the results show that HSNP really has high performance in forwarding packets.