• Company says Jericho2 is the industry’s highest bandwidth Ethernet switch-router
• Says it is accelerating the merchant silicon revolution in carrier networks
• Delivers five times higher bandwidth at 70 per cent lower power per gigabit
• Broadcom hopes it will change the economics of edge, aggregation and core networks

Broadcom has announced the immediate availability of its Jericho2 and FE9600, the next generation of its StrataDNX family of system-on-chip (SoC) switch-routers. It claims that Jericho2 delivers five times higher bandwidth at 70 per cent lower power per gigabit than its predecessor. Jericho2 supports high-density industry standard 400GbE, 200GbE and 100GbE interfaces and offers 10 Terabits per second performance. Coupled with Elastic Pipe packet processing and large scale buffering with integrated High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), Broadcom says Jericho2 is designed to meet the needs of carrier networks while offering “disruptive economics”.

“The Jericho franchise is the industry’s most innovative and scalable silicon used today in various switch-routers by leading carriers,” said Ram Velaga, SVP & GM of Switch Products at Broadcom. “Jericho2 will accelerate the transition of carrier grade networks to merchant silicon based systems with best-in-class cost/performance.”

Broadcom is also now shipping FE9600, a new fabric switch device with 192 links. At 9.6Tbit/s fabric capacity, it says the FE9600 offers over 50 per cent reduction in power per gigabit compared to its predecessor. The new SoCs have been optimised for service providers, cloud data centres and large enterprise networks.

“OEM ASICs dominated the router market for years as merchant silicon fell short of the features and performance required by this demanding market,” said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “Jericho helped open the door for merchant silicon in routers. With the availability of the 10Tbit/s Jericho2, OEMs will find it more difficult to justify the massive investment required to develop new router ASICs."

Carrier networks require a high level of flexibility to address emerging use cases, standards and protocols. Jericho2 features the new Elastic Pipe technology, which the company describes as an evolution of the StrataDNX field-proven programmable pipe architecture. It is designed to future-proof Jericho2 switch-routers by enabling new services while avoiding costly hardware replacements.

“At AT&T we are fully committed to leading the industry towards a new networking paradigm, one that delivers faster networks, quicker innovation cycles and lower CAPEX and OPEX, while most importantly – staying ahead of our customer needs,” said Chris Rice, SVP of Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design at AT&T. “Merchant Silicon, as well as hardware/software disaggregation, are instrumental to this future. Broadcom's Jericho2 10Tbit/s Router chip is in line with this vision and could enable AT&T to accelerate this transition.”

Broadcom says Jericho2 opens service providers to a cost optimized, high-bandwidth and low power choice for their router systems, thereby changing the economics of building and maintaining edge, aggregation and core networks as they move towards 5G.

“China Mobile is leading the 5G revolution that will provide a new level of connectivity, speed, and user scale,” said Dr. Han Li, director of Network Research Institute, China Mobile. “Jericho2 availability will drive a new wave of high-bandwidth solutions with best-in-class flexibility that could serve as the cornerstone for future 5G carrier networks.”