YOKNEAM, Israel -- EZchip Semiconductor Ltd. (NASDAQ:EZCH), a leader in Ethernet network processors, today unveiled the NPS – Network Processor for Smart networks – a revolutionary network processor (NPU) that will enable the next generation of smart high-performance carrier and data-center equipment. Through its breakthrough architecture the NPS boosts the flexibility and performance of traditional NPUs and CPUs to enable advanced baseline features for carrier equipment and to scale the performance levels of data-center equipment. NPS provides equipment vendors with a feature-proof, fully programmable, high performance solution and expands the market addressable by EZchip’s NPUs. EZchip will present details of the NPS architecture at the Linley Tech Processor Conference on October 10-11, 2012 in San Jose, California.

For carrier equipment, the NPS enables the migration of advanced layer 4-7 features from specialized services cards to common line cards and enables the line card with new baseline features such as application recognition and IPSec VPNs, as well as greater velocity for adding new features. For data-center equipment, the NPS allows scaling their performance to the required loads of the evolving data center for greater layer 2-7 capabilities within constrained power and space. It empowers data-center appliances as well as carrier appliances with line-rate performance for applications such as load balancing, firewall and OpenFlow/SDN (Software Defined Networks) and network virtualization.

EZchip Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: EZCH)