Broadcom Switch Chipset Families
Broadcom Switch Chipset Families Broadcom dominates merchant silicon for data center and carrier switching. Their three main ASIC families, Tomahawk, Trident, and Jericho, each make different tradeoffs between bandwidth, feature depth, and buffer size. Most Arista, Cisco Nexus, and Juniper QFX/PTX platforms run one of these under the hood. 1. Tomahawk Series Design philosophy: Maximum port density and throughput at the cost of feature depth. These chips use cut-through forwarding, carry shallow on-chip buffers (~50–100 MB), and support little to no L3 routing table depth. The trade-off is intentional; at spine and AI fabric scale, you want wire-rate forwarding with predictable low latency, not a large TCAM. ...