Will ASICs be replaced in comms gear?

Rick Merritt, EETimes
4/19/2013 2:15 AM EDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Nick McKeown, an engineering professor at Stanford University, expects a new breed of merchant networking processors to replace ASICs in routers and switches over the next decade.

McKeown says he has looked into the future of communication processors “and if you squint hard it looks like RISC for networking.”

McKeown helped kick start the movement toward software-defined networking based on the OpenFlow protocol. Its goal is to enable a new class of software apps that manage gangs of simplified switches and routers.

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