SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Centec Networks, a leading innovator of IP/Ethernet switching silicon and advanced turnkey system solutions, unveiled today announced N-FlowTM technology in its third generation GreatBelt Series Switching Silicon at ONS 2013, to enable more advanced applications for Software-Defined Networking (SDN), in attempt to widen the commercialization of the OpenFlowTM protocol.TCAM is widely used in supporting the wild-card matching rule according to OpenFlow™ specification, resulting in high power, cost, and limited number of entries. In most applications of the OpenFlow protocol the required flow key may be different. However, for a specific application, usually the required key fields are identical, such as IP 5-tuple key fields. With such, Centec Networks introduced N-FlowTM technology to combine TCAM based wildcard rules with hash based exact match rules. N-FlowTM technology can greatly extend the number of flows embedded on the chip, while maintaining the flexibility of matching rules, at the cost and power similar to regular switch silicon.With N-FlowTM technology, GreatBelt supports up to 64K L2 flows, 64K IPv4 flows, or 32K L2+IPv4 flows, as well as the 4K wild-card matching flows on the chip. It also features two stage flow tables that can be concatenated with metadata, with more stage flow tables available via Centec’s patented internal loopback mechanism. The chip provides 120G bps switching capacity with less than 15W power consumption at maximum. It optimizes for OpenFlow1.3 to support group table, meter, and MPLS.Centec Networks (Su Zhou) Co. Ltd.