The era of the traffic-management custom part may be nearing its end. This was the message hidden in the new Qxx device that now is a part of every C-Port family network processor design from Motorola: Traffic management has become enough of a standardized function to warrant an application-specific standard product design in most line cards, particularly at the network edge.

The introduction confirms what pioneers like Extreme Packet Devices Inc. and Orologic Inc. said a few years ago.

The tricky task in standardization in recent years has been in defining where the management of Internet Protocol (IP) flows belongs. IBM Microelectronics, for example, has stressed keeping traffic management close to the switching fabric, and that philosophy has driven four generations of Prizm fabric design. Other vendors have opted for different wrinkles of in-line or lookaside designs that have resided closer to the main packet processor. And the differing needs of asynchronous transfer mode and IP traffic have generated different concepts of traffic managers.

Now, we have reached a stage in IP flow-management maturity where a vendor no longer has to track five traffic types and 12 buffering algorithms. Most IP flows will be handled by some form of label swapping based on the generalized multiprotocol label switching standard. And queuing methods will be based on fairly generic Weighted Random Early Discard or Weighted Fair Queuing principles.

Dave Husak, chief technology officer of the C-Port group at Motorola, said such standardization represents the end of "quality-of- service being the special sauce concocted individually by each OEM."

Others have noticed as well. IBM, using the switching fabric as a lever to drive its network processor designs, has plugged standard traffic management for the past year. And Vitesse Semiconductor Inc. has pulled its Orologic and Si-Tera product groups closer together, putting more emphasis on providing finer-grained quality-of-service for OC-48 and OC-48c networks than it does on rushing to OC-192 support.

The hard wiring and "ASSP-izing" of traffic management may come too late for some. The Extreme Packet Devices group at PMC-Sierra was shut late last summer. Entridia, a specialist in hardwiring packet forwarding and traffic management, was in dire straits by mid-October. And Acorn Networks Inc., a traffic management startup, was on the ropes late in the month.

Again, business conditions suggest the bigger players may be the only ones to take advantage of traffic management moving into standard silicon.