Broadcom announced its new XGS Core switch fabric for use in a new class of low power, high density, highly reliable Ethernet switches for data center, enterprise and service provider networks.
The XGS Core fabric architecture connects seamlessly with Broadcom’s StrataXGS switch silicon and software, enabling networking OEMs to bring a new generation of high performance modular Ethernet platforms to market with substantially lower development costs and significantly faster time-to-revenue. Currently, network equipment vendors typically develop their own custom ASICs and employ FPGAs for building core networking gear.
The Broadcom XGS Core fabric solution consists of three new product series: a high performance traffic manager and fabric interface (BCM88200 series), a scalable switch fabric (BCM88100 series) and a high density buffer manager (BCM56900 series).
The Broadcom BCM88200 series of non-blocking, fabric interface and traffic manager devices support up to 80 Gbps of full duplex bandwidth per device. The BCM88200 series:
- Provides deep packet buffering using standard, low cost DDR3 DRAM memory for a substantial cost savings over specialized memories traditionally used for packet buffering;
- Delivers a highly integrated solution, eliminating the need for costly external components, therefore, lowering overall system cost and power, and increasing line card densities; and
- Integrates Broadcom’s serializer/deserialzer (SerDes) technology for fabric connectivity that runs up to 6.56 Gbps per link, simplifying backplane designs for higher density and lower power systems.
The Broadcom BCM88100 series of scalable switch fabric devices support an industry leading 1.2 Terabits per second (Tbps) bandwidth per device enabling a non-blocking, Virtual Output Queued (VOQ) fabric that can scale to over 20 Tbps of overall fabric capacity. Using an advanced global scheduling architecture, the BCM88100 series delivers high fabric efficiency, guaranteed latency and deterministic Quality of Service (QoS) enabling a network architecture for virtualized data center, enterprise and service provider designs. Additionally, the BCM88100 series:
- Integrates built-in scheduling support for 40 GbE and 100 GbE flows to future proof next generation chassis designs;
- Provides a bufferless crossbar fabric that dissipates substantially less power than traditional buffered crossbars; and
- Supports hardware-based fault detection and failover that is more than one thousand times faster than traditional approaches.
The Broadcom BCM56900 series of deep buffer managers support up to 80 Gbps of full duplex bandwidth and connect seamlessly within existing StrataXGS stackable and chassis architectures. With eight high speed HiGig) interfaces and low cost, external DRAM for deep buffering, the BCM56900 series integrates easily within StrataXGS fabric or stackable designs. This allows Broadcom customers with existing StrataXGS designs to quickly drop-in the BCM56900 series of products to add deep buffering in a very dense form factor to improve traffic performance during periods of heavy congestion.
The Broadcom BCM88100 switch fabric series is in production. The BCM88200 series of fabric interface and traffic managers and the BCM56900 series of buffer managers are now sampling. http://www.broadcom.com
