Date: 04/12/2012

28nm KBP chip from Broadcom for telecom infra equipment

Broadcom Corporation has started sampling the NLA12000 Series, what it claims as the industry's first heterogeneous Knowledge-Based Processors (KBPs) manufactured in 28 nanometer (nm).

Broadcom's NLA12000 Series are optimized for deployment in routers, switches, service gateways, security appliances and mobile infrastructure equipment. The NLA12000 Series KBPs integrate parallel knowledge-based processing technology with innovative low-power NetRoute algorithmic search technology in a heterogeneous manner with support for up to 2 million IPv6 routes.

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.