Cavium Networks and Applied Micro Circuits Corporation's switching and network processing group (AMCC)(Nasdaq:AMCC) today announced a partnership to offer reference designs for development of high performance secure networking equipment.

Cavium's NITROX Security Macro Processor is a single chip, high performance security processing solution for both IPsec and SSL protocols. NITROX will be used in a wide range of networking equipment such as routers, switches, web-servers, server load balancers, firewalls, SANs, and VPN gateways to enable a secure and authenticated Internet.

AMCC's market-leading nP and nPX families of network processors, traffic managers, and switch fabrics address the high-performance needs of the evolving intelligent network. AMCC's semiconductor components are used in networking equipment made by market leaders.

"Time to market is everything. Providing a complete solution to the OEM significantly helps in reducing system design cycle times," said Syed Ali, President and CEO of Cavium Networks. "Combining AMCC's proven and widely deployed network processors with NITROX, the worlds fastest security macro processor will enable system vendors to quickly add comprehensive, high performance, feature rich, security functionality to their equipment."

Joint reference designs will incorporate AMCCs nP and nPX families with both the recently announced NITROX and the upcoming NITROX II to offer a range of 1 Gigabit to 10 Gigabit security solutions. In addition to processors, Cavium Networks provides the complete security software suite to implement IPsec or SSL. Cavium's TurboIPsec and TurboSSL software suites include source code for low level drivers and modified IPsec, IKE and SSL code, which has been optimized for multiple operating systems.

"Our relationship with Cavium Networks further demonstrates AMCC's leadership in enabling readily deployable networking solutions for a wide variety of applications," says Jeff Cashen, vice president and general manager of AMCC's switching and network processing division. "Through such partnerships we aim to enable our customers to garner ever increasing returns on their investment in products based on AMCC's network processor technology."

"Reference designs are key for system designers to efficiently and quickly evaluate different processors," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. "The partnership between AMCC and Cavium will help both companies demonstrate their performance and easy integration. Both companies are providing a complete solution with hardware and middleware that promises to accelerate time to market for OEMs that adopt this solution."

Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) (Nasdaq: AMCC)