The Agoura Hills, California-based company is developing a line of chips that will be used in a variety of communications equipment. It has released a software developer kit that will enable hardware OEMs to evaluate its technology and start developing products to be ready for its chipsets when they become available later this year.

"Most of our competitors offer just one piece, not a complete solution," says Chris Hoogenboom, Internet Machines' president and CEO. IM will offer the software, the silicon and the switch fabric elements, he says. Equipment vendors currently have to integrate chips from different vendors, something that's hard to accomplish, he notes. Pre-integration should speed up development time, save money and make future product upgrades easier.

Traditional single-function ASIC chips can take 18 months or more to build, and new ones are needed to add new functionality. Hoogenboom believes programmable network processors are the answer. Software upgrades, which can be done remotely, can be completed in "weeks," he says.

The network processors that IM is developing will support "virtually all" of the networking protocols, the company says. Target customers include manufacturers of core routers, metro switches, data centers and optical switches, such as Nortel, Tellium, Alcatel and Lucent.

John Metz, executive vice president of market research firm Sterling Research, agrees that speed is only one part of the equation: "You have to offer high levels of programming support. Currently no one offers software support above level 3 [of the seven-layer model], and by offering full support, Internet Machines will have an advantage over many, if not all of its competitors." But to maintain any advantage, he says, the company will have to meet its planned silicon ship date of later this year, because others are also working very hard on similar functionality.

Metz explains that Internet Machines is an example of the latest wave of network processor startup. The first generation of companies, which emerged about two years ago, were snapped up by larger firms, such as Broadcom, IBM, Intel and Motorola. Intel, for instance, put its IXA architecture together by acquiring a number of hardware and software startups, including Digital Semiconductor, Netboost, Softcom, Basis, Trillium and VxTel.

However, that silicon from Intel and others has only just recently reached the market, he notes, with the bulk of the business in the OC-12 (6.22Gbps) space. Transition to OC-48 (2.488Gbps) is now starting to happen, but the OC-192 market is virtually untapped.