Dec 4 2012
Broadcom Corporation, a global innovation leader in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications, today announced it has started sampling the NLA12000 Series, the industry's first heterogeneous KBPs manufactured in 28 nanometer (nm).
Designed to meet the scalability and efficiency demands of 3G/4G mobile infrastructure, data center and enterprise environments, Broadcom's new knowledge-based processors deliver up to 24x greater performance than competing solutions in the most demanding applications.
Continued exponential growth in hosted services, coupled with emerging trends such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Open Flow, is driving the demand for increased classification, forwarding and security processing throughout the network. In addition, the industry's migration from IPv4 to IPv6 to accommodate the growing number of connected mobile devices is resulting in 4x larger knowledge databases for Layers 2-4 processing. Combined, these factors require knowledge-based processors with significantly higher performance, larger knowledge databases and lower power profiles.
Broadcom's NLA12000 Series KBPs are ideally suited to address these stringent next-generation network requirements and are optimized for deployment in routers, switches, service gateways, security appliances and mobile infrastructure equipment. The NLA12000 Series KBPs are the industry's first to integrate an eighth generation massively parallel knowledge-based processing technology with innovative low-power NetRoute algorithmic search technology in a heterogeneous manner, delivering the highest deterministic performance and low latency independent of database or signature complexity, with support for up to 2 million IPv6 routes.2
In addition to delivering the highest performance, the combination of Broadcom's innovative NetRoute technology with the advanced 28nm process node enables the NLA12000 Series KBPs to achieve the industry's lowest power footprint for IPv4 and IPv6 searches.
Market Drivers
- Increase in services provided by carriers impacting amount of processing (searches) per packet
- Increased demand for more complex processing including application recognition
- Transition to IPv6 driving the growth in size of forwarding and access control list tables3
- Emergence of OpenFlow standards and Software Defined Networking (SDN)
Key Features
- Concurrently delivers up to 24x higher performance, 2.4x knowledge database capacity per device4
- 2.4 billion decisions per second (BDPS) to address growing line rates for IPv4 and IPv6 packets
- High-speed serial links for enhanced communication from KBP to system packet processors
- Includes 12.5 Gbps SerDes for 300 Gbps aggregate bandwidth
- Dual-port mode for off-the shelf network processors, FPGAs and customer ASICs
- Improved search flexibility with Context Buffers and Key Processing Unit (KPU)
- Range Encoding Engine (REE) delivers efficient database compaction for access control lists
- Support for on-chip associated data for search tables to enable lowest system latency
Availability
Broadcom's 28nm heterogeneous KBPs are currently sampling with production volumes slated for 1H 2013.