Date: 15/09/2010

Linley: Embedded multicore security processors' sales grew by 25 percent in 2009

Market researcher Linley Group has come out with a recent report titled "A Guide to Processors for Network Security", an updated market analysis report on security processor semiconductor chips. The report contains review of security processor market drivers, including silicon integration trends and security feature requirements. This report compares processor chips from semiconductor vendors such as Cavium, Freescale Semiconductor, LSI, Netronome, NetLogic and Tilera

"Outside of traditional security equipment, networking applications including enterprise routers and service-provider infrastructure, have adopted the use of embedded multicore security processors, which drove their sales to grow by 25 percent in 2009," said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group. "Reflecting that growth and changes in the market, we restructured this edition of our report to focus on processors that integrate hardware acceleration for security functions, which serve a $1 billion market. As the cost of chip development continues to climb, the larger available processor market will be critical for security processor vendors to amortize their R&D investments."

Linley reports despite last year's tumultuous economy, sales of network security equipment and software remained strong as compared to other enterprise markets, according to the report. The key technology trend highlighted is the increased level of Integration inside the security processor semiconductor chips resulting in availability of highly integrated system on a chip (SoC) processors. Linley says Intel's Xeon is popular though it lacks the hardware accelerators.