Hardware

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. ...

Form Factor Speed Lanes (Elec) Modulation Connector Types Approx. Intro SFP+ 10 Gbps 1 x 10G NRZ LC Duplex, RJ45 2006 SFP28 25 Gbps 1 x 25G NRZ LC Duplex 2014 SFP56 50 Gbps 1 x 50G PAM4 LC Duplex 2019 SFP-DD 100 Gbps 2 x 50G PAM4 LC Duplex 2019/20 QSFP+ 40 Gbps 4 x 10G NRZ MPO-12, LC 2012 QSFP28 100 Gbps 4 x 25G NRZ MPO-12, LC 2014 QSFP56 200 Gbps 4 x 50G PAM4 MPO-12, LC 2019 QSFP-DD 400G / 800G 8 x 50/100G PAM4 MPO-16, LC, CS 2017/21 OSFP 400G / 800G 8 x 50/100G PAM4 MPO-12/16, LC 2019 OSFP1600 1.6 Tbps 8 x 200G PAM4 MPO, Dual LC 2024/25