Intel® IXP42X Product Line of Network Processors and IXC1100 Control Plane Processor
2.1
Functional Units
The following sections briefly describe the functional units and their interaction in the system. For
more detailed information, refer to the Intel® IXP42X Product Line of Network Processors and
IXC1100 Control Plane Processor Developer’s Manual.
Unless otherwise specified, the functional descriptions apply to all processors in the IXP42X
product line and IXC1100 control plane processors. Refer to Table 3 on page 14 and Figure 1 on
page 15 through Figure 5 for specific information on supported interfaces
2.1.1
Network Processor Engines (NPEs)
The network processor engines (NPEs) are dedicated-function processors containing hardware
coprocessors integrated into the IXP42X product line and IXC1100 control plane processors. The
NPEs are used to off-load processing functions required by the Intel XScale core.
These NPEs are high-performance, hardware-multi-threaded processors with additional local-
hardware-assist functionality used to off-load highly processor-intensive functions such as MII
(MAC), CRC checking/generation, AAL 2, AES, DES, SHA-1, and MD5. All instruction code for
the NPEs are stored locally with a dedicated instruction memory bus and dedicated data memory
bus.
These NPEs support processing of the dedicated peripherals that can include:
• A Universal Test and Operation PHY Interface for ATM (UTOPIA) 2 interface
• Two High-Speed Serial (HSS) interfaces
• Two Media-Independent Interfaces (MII)
Table 4 specifies which devices, in the IXP42X product line and IXC1100 control plane
processors, have which of these capabilities.
Table 4.
Processor Functions
AES / DES / Multi-Channel SHA-1 /
Device
UTOPIA HSS MII 0 MII 1
DES3
HDLC
MD-5
Intel® IXP425 Network
Processor, B-Step
Intel® IXP423 Network
Processor
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
8
X
8
8
Intel® IXP422 Network
Processor
X
X
Intel® IXP421 Network
Processor
X
X
Intel® IXP420 Network
Processor
X
X
Intel® IXC1100 Control
Plane Processor
The NPE core is a hardware-multi-threaded processor engine that is used to accelerate functions
that are difficult to achieve high performance in a standard RISC processor. Each NPE core is a 133
MHz processor core that has self-contained instruction memory and self-contained data memory
that operate in parallel.
March 2005
20
Datasheet
Document Number: 252479, Revision: 005
INTEL [ INTEL ]
