Tomahawk 6: The industry’s first 100-terabit switch chip

Part 2: Data Centre Switching

Peter Del Vecchio, product manager for the Tomahawk switch family at Broadcom, outlines the role of the company’s latest Tomahawk 6 Ethernet switch chip in AI data centres.

Peter Del Vecchio

Broadcom is now shipping samples of its Tomahawk 6, the industry’s first 102.4-terabit-per-second (Tbps) Ethernet switch chip.

The chip highlights AI's impact on Ethernet networking switch chip design since Broadcom launched its current leading device, the 51.2-terabit Tomahawk 5.

The Tomahawk 6 is more evolutionary, rather than a complete change, notes Del Vecchio.

The design doubles bandwidth and includes enhanced networking features to support AI scale-up and scale-out networks.

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Broadcom’s silicon for the PCI Express 6.0 era

Broadcom has detailed its first silicon for the sixth generation of the PCI Express (PCIe 6.0) bus, developed with AI servers in mind.

Sreenivas Bagalkote

The two types of PCIe 6.0 devices are a switch chip and a retimer.

Broadcom, working with Teledyne LeCroy, is also making available an interoperability development platform to aid engineers adopting the PCIe 6.0 standard as part of their systrems.

Compute servers for AI are placing new demands on the PCIe bus. The standard no longer about connects CPUs to peripherals but also serving the communication needs of AI accelerator chips.

“AI servers have become a lot more complicated, and connectivity is now very important,” says Sreenivas Bagalkote, Broadcom’s product line manager for the data center solutions group.

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First 50G-PON merchant silicon spurs operator trials

Broadcom has unveiled the industry’s first merchant silicon for the 50-gigabit passive optical network (50G-PON) access standard. Until now, only access equipment players such as Huawei and ZTE had their own 50G-PON silicon.  

A 50G-PON network. Source: Adtran.

Broadcom has announced two 50G-PON devices: an optical line terminal (OLT) chip and the optical networking unit (ONU) 50-PON port to the users.  Both chips include custom hardware from Broadcom to run artificial intelligence (AI) machine-learning algorithms. 

Jim Muth, senior manager of product marketing at Broadcom, says supporting AI benefits the operator and the quality of the end user’s broadband service. 

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ECOC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Here are the first contributions from Huawei's Maxim Kuschnerov, Coherent's Vipul Bhatt, and Broadcom's Rajiv Pancholy.

Source: Shutterstock

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

At ECOC, my main interest concerned the evolution of data centre networking to 400 gigabits per lane for optics and electronics. Historically, the adoption of new optical line rates always preceded the serdes electrical interconnects but now copper cables are likely to drive much of the leading development work at 400 gigabit per lane.

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Broadcom's Thor 2 looks to hammer top spot in AI NICs

Broadcom has announced the availability of network interface cards (NICs) for large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) computers. 

Jas Tremblay

The NIC cards are using Broadcom's Thor 2 chip which started sampling in 2023 and is now in volume production.

Jas Tremblay, vice president and general manager of the data center solutions group at Broadcom, says the Thor 2 is the industry's first 400 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) NIC device to be implemented in a 5nm CMOS process.  

"It [the design] gives customers choices and freedom when they're building their AI systems such that they can use different NICs with different [Ethernet] switches," says Tremblay.

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Teramount’s scalable fibre-attach for co-packaged optics

Part 2: Co-packaged optics: fibre-attach

Hesham Taha recently returned from a trip to the US to meet with leading vendors and players serving the silicon photonics industry.

“It is important to continue probing the industry,” says Taha, the CEO of start-up Teramount.

Teramount specialises in fibre assembly technology: coupling fibre to silicon photonics chips.

Taha is now back in the US, this time to unveil Teramount’s latest product at this week’s OFC show being held in San Diego. The company is detailing a new version of its fibre assembly technology, dubbed Teraverse-XD, that doubles the density of fibres connected to a silicon photonics chip.

Teramount is also announcing it is working with GlobalFoundries, a leading silicon-photonics foundry.

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Broadcoms taps AI to improve switch chip traffic analysis

Broadcom's Trident 5-X12 networking chip is the company's first to add an artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing engine.

The latest Trident, Tomahawk, and Jericho devices. Source: Broadcom.

Data centre operators can use their network traffic to train the chip's neural network. The Trident 5's inference engine, dubbed the Networking General-purpose Neural-network Traffic-analyzer or NetGNT, is loaded with the resulting trained model to classify traffic and detect security threats.

"It is the first time we have put a neural network focused on traffic analysis into a chip," says Robin Grindley, principal product line manager with Broadcom's Core Switching Group.

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