Gigabit IP Routing on Raw

Network processors afford a great degree of flexibility to current day routers, yet they still have followed the trend of being largely specialized to the domain of route table look-up. By using a processor architecture that is more general purpose, routers can gain from economies of scale and increased programmatic flexibility. We propose the use of the Raw Processor [5] as both a network processor and switch fabric for multi-gigabit IP routing. While previous general purpose architectures have failed to give a useful programmatic interface to sufficient bandwidth to support multi-gigabit IP routing, the Raw Processor, through its tiled architecture and software exposed on-chip networking, has enough internal and external bandwidth to deal with high rate routing problems. We describe why the integration of processing elements and switch fabric leads to increased flexibility for one chip router solutions, and propose a rotating crossbar design that achieves efficient IP routing on the Raw static network. 1