Discussion

Foreword
The early days at Juniper Networks were not for the faint of heart. Joining during the
hiring rush of early 1997, I found that the cubes and offices of the small office in
Santa Clara, California were already packed with experienced old hands—people
whom I knew had been around the block once before and would not be shy of
expressing themselves. Everyone had strong views on nearly every aspect of building
a router from scratch. If you had the misfortune to sit next to a busy conference
room, a good pair of headphones and large CD collection were required to drown
out the arguments. Design meetings often became heated, and egos were occasionally
bruised. Our friends from previous employers taunted us with predictions of
doom.
Despite the arguments, we were all united and driven by one solitary goal: to win the
competition to build the best Internet core router available. This was a serious challenge,
considering the primary competition was a 300-pound gorilla in the form of
Cisco Systems. Beating Cisco would require us to produce a router that tackled the
perceived weaknesses in its core router platform. A Juniper Networks core router
would have to provide line-rate performance (which, for the M40 router meant forwarding
around 40 million packets per second), robust core routing protocols, and
stable control software. In short, it had to make customers really want to use it.
The performance requirements meant that the network traffic had to be forwarded
entirely in hardware. This was something that had never before been attempted for a
core network router. As a result, the hardware design of the M40 looked like science
fiction to Juniper recruits who had worked on other networking products. The entire
forwarding path of the router was constructed from four Application Specific Integrated
Circuits (ASICs), designed entirely by Juniper. These four ASICs (called A, B,
C, and D to prevent loose lips from revealing their function) were huge, intricate,
and enormously ambitious. A large design team of experienced engineers was assembled
to implement the ASICs and partnered with another large verification team to
check that the designs were functionally correct. Since Silicon Valley was littered
with networking startups that had failed because of silicon design problems, there
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