Broadcom Brings Programmable Packet Processing to Trident 3 Switching Silicon

Broadcom unveiled a new generation of its widely-deployed Trident switching silicon for data center, enterprise, and service provider networks.

The new StrataXGS Trident 3 switch family, which is aimed at networks transitioning to high density 10/25/100G Ethernet, is manufactured in 16nm and designed to support fully programmable packet processing, while achieving significant cost and power efficiency. It builds on Broadcom’s widely deployed StrataXGS Trident and Tomahawk switch products by offering fully programmable, line-rate switching. It supports new protocol parsing, processing, and editing for Service Function Chaining, Network Virtualization, and SDN. It offers programmable support for new switch instrumentation capabilities such as in-band and out-of-band network telemetry. The StrataXGS Trident 3 also retains complete functional compatibility to with StrataXGS Trident 2 and Trident 2+ based networks, which were widely adopted by network equipment manufacturers.

“The innovation in our StrataXGS Trident 3 Series is in delivering a fully programmable switching pipeline while maintaining backwards compatibility to the existing install base of StrataXGS Trident and Trident 2 based networks,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager, Switch Products at Broadcom. “Rather than a blank slate, our customers want a scalable, bulletproof network data plane that is reprogrammable to address future requirements, while continuing to aggressively drive down Ethernet cost and power. With Trident 3, we’ve uniquely delivered that solution. Our customers can leverage a single development to yield a complete line of programmable switching platforms, with the same rich feature set extending all the way from the service provider edge, to the data center, converged campus core, and wiring closet.”

Broadcom said the FleXGS architecture in Trident 3 comprises of new programmable parsing, lookup, and editing engines with associated reconfigurable databases. The engines are dimensioned and arrayed to maximize parallelism, performance, functional capacity and area/power efficiency to best address the diverse and concurrent needs of today’s evolving networks.  The pipeline can be programmed to handle software-defined network virtualization and service chaining protocols, including VXLAN, GPE, NSH, Geneve, MPLS, MPLS over GRE, MPLS over UDP, GUE, Identifier Locator Addressing (ILA) and PPPoE, among others.

StrataXGS Trident 3 Switch Series Key Features

• High density 1/2.5/5/10/25/40/50/100GbE port connectivity using best-in-class integrated 10/25Gbps NRZ SerDes
•  Example single-chip platforms and line cards include spine and converged campus core (32x100GbE), 25/100GbE Top-of Rack (48x25GbE + 8x100GbE) and 10/100GbE Top-of-Rack (48x10GbE + 6x100GbE) 
• 32MB on-chip, 100% fully shared packet buffer delivers up to 8X higher network burst absorption and congestion avoidance compared to previous generations
• Large, programmable on-chip forwarding databases for L2 switching, L3 routing, label switching, and overlay forwarding
• 3X increased ACL scale to support evolving policy/security requirements
• PCIe Gen3 x4 host CPU interface with on-chip accelerators improves control-plane update and boot performance by up to 5X
• Programmable support for enhanced network telemetry, including per-packet timestamping, Flow Tracker, microburst detection, latency/drop monitor, Active-probe-based in-band network telemetry, and in-band OAM processing; integrated with open-source BroadView v2 telemetry agent and analytics software
• Dynamic, State-Based Flow Distribution provides systematic and adaptive reduction in link congestion and traffic imbalances in large-scale Layer3/ECMP leaf-spine networks
• Adaptive Routing for dynamic traffic engineering in non-Clos topologies
• Full feature compatibility with previous generation Trident 2 and Trident 2+ devices

The first two members of the StrataXGS Trident 3 family are currently sampling: BCM56870 (3.2 Tbps) and BCM56873 (2.0 Tbps).

http://www.broadcom.com