Allayer (San Jose, Calif.)said its AL1032 chip can directly connect LAN traffic to a network core by combining Ethernet streams into a 10 Gbit/second feed, then sending that feed into the network core at OC-192 (10-Gbit/s) Sonet rates. The conversion from Ethernet to Sonet can be handled easily by an FPGA, Allayer said. The chip could also be used as a direct connection to OC-192 pipes from Internet points-of-presence or enterprise networks.

The AL1032 includes 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports and one port designed for 10-Gbit/s traffic. To connect the 10-Gbit/s port to an external PHY, the AL1032 supports the XGMII interface standard, which is being finalized by the IEEE 802.3ae task force working to define the 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard.

One-fifth of the chip is taken up by the logic and memory that make up the policy engine, said Yongbum Kim, chief technical officer of Allayer. The engine uses specialized hardware to determine classes of service for packets based on information as high up as Layer 7 in the OSI stack.

Allayer refers to this process as "classification," but company officials made it clear they aren't doing the same content-based routing and switching that is being tackled by classification engines from other startups.

"Load balancing, cookie[-based] switching, that aspect is very difficult to solve," Kim said. Instead, Allayer's chip only determines which quality-of-service level to assign to a packet.

Future products related to the AL1032 will aim at the integrated LAN and WAN, building on the assumption that the two will become more similar as both go beyond 10-Gbit/s speeds, said Cheng-chung Shih, Allayer's chief executive. Allayer officials declined to comment on whether they would consider building a separate chip containing the classification engine, stating that such a chip would have to integrate the engine with a variety of other functions.

The AL1032 is sampling and is due to begin volume production in November, priced at $250 each in quantities of 10,000.