Vendor lineage
Broadcom - the silicon inside almost everybody's switch
Merchant switching silicon supplier, and the company most networking equipment on this timeline depends on without saying so.
Broadcom Corporation was founded in August 1991 by Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli as a fabless maker of Ethernet and cable modem chips. It is now the dominant supplier of merchant switching silicon - the StrataXGS families, Trident and Tomahawk, and the deep-buffer StrataDNX line that came from its 2009 purchase of Dune Networks.
Merchant silicon is the reason the switch market stopped being a silicon competition. Before it, a networking manufacturer designed its own forwarding chips, and that capital requirement was the barrier to entry - the reason the vendors on this timeline from the 1990s were few and large. The Trident family arrived in 2010 and made a competitive switch buildable by anyone who could buy the same part, which is why the industry filled with equipment that differs in software and support rather than in the chip doing the forwarding.
The scale of that dependence is easy to understate. Every established networking vendor uses merchant silicon in at least some of its products, and the reference implementations of leaf and spine switching are overwhelmingly built on one supplier’s families. A great deal of the equipment described elsewhere on this site is, at the forwarding plane, the same chip in different sheet metal.
The corporate history is the strangest part and worth stating plainly. The company now called Broadcom traces to HP Associates in 1961, was carved out of Agilent by private equity in 2005 as Avago, and in January 2016 Avago bought Broadcom Corporation for US$37 billion and took its name - the smaller, more profitable company buying the larger one and adopting its brand. Then Brocade in 2017, CA in 2018, Symantec’s enterprise business in 2019 and VMware for US$69 billion in 2023.
That acquisition path crosses this timeline repeatedly. Brocade is where the Ruckus entry’s chain begins; Symantec appears in the security cluster; and VMware sits under a great deal of the infrastructure the networking equipment connects. A company selling switching chips ended up owning the hypervisor as well.
- Broadcom Corporation (Wikipedia): American fabless semiconductor company founded August 1991 by Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli, making products for wireless and broadband communication; traded on Nasdaq as BRCM from 1998 to 2016; products included Gigabit Ethernet, network switches, cable modems and VoIP
- Avago Technologies (Wikipedia): the company that became Broadcom Inc. was established in 1961 as HP Associates, a Hewlett-Packard semiconductor division; KKR and Silver Lake acquired Agilent’s Semiconductor Products Group in 2005 for US$2.6 billion to form Avago; Avago changed its name to Broadcom in January 2016 to acquire Broadcom Corporation, retaining the AVGO ticker while BRCM was retired; the VMware acquisition, announced May 2022 at US$69 billion, closed 22 November 2023
- The Next Platform, December 2019 - the US$178 million deal in December 2009 for Dune Networks, which continues as the Jericho StrataDNX deep-buffer line, was pivotal for Broadcom’s merchant silicon aspirations; the Trident family arrived in 2010 and ramped up merchant capabilities against the captive chips made by networking incumbents including Cisco, Juniper, Hewlett Packard (3Com) and Dell (Force10)
- A summary of high-speed Ethernet ASICs: Broadcom’s two important families in this space are StrataXGS and StrataDNX, the latter from its acquisition of Dune; these chips are called merchant silicon because they are sold to other parties who build systems around them, and all network vendors use merchant silicon in at least some of their routers and switches; the Arista 7500 is based on the StrataDNX chipset
- Broadcom - merchant silicon: the Tomahawk 5 / BCM78900 series of 51.2 Tb/s devices for data centre and cloud environments