Broadcom Jericho
By Broadcom
Broadcom Jericho is a family of carrier-grade switch and router silicon built for service-provider and large-scale routing applications that need deep packet buffering, rich traffic management, and sophisticated protocol support. It…
Definition
Broadcom Jericho is a family of carrier-grade switch and router silicon built for service-provider and large-scale routing applications that need deep packet buffering, rich traffic management, and sophisticated protocol support. It differs from Broadcom's data-center-focused Tomahawk line by prioritizing buffering depth and routing feature richness over sheer port density, making it a common choice for edge and core routers in telecom and large enterprise networks.
Overview
Wide-area and carrier networks face a different engineering problem than data center fabrics: traffic arrives in bursts from many directions, links can be congested for extended periods, and providers need fine-grained control over how different customers' traffic is queued, shaped, and prioritized. Broadcom Jericho is the chip family built to address that problem, offering deep on-chip and off-chip buffering alongside a rich set of routing and quality-of-service features that let network operators enforce service-level guarantees across shared infrastructure. Mechanically, a Jericho-based device combines a forwarding pipeline capable of complex route lookups, tunneling, and encapsulation with a buffering subsystem substantially deeper than what a pure data-center switch chip provides, often extending to external high-bandwidth memory to hold packets during congestion rather than dropping them. This lets a router absorb sustained bursts and apply hierarchical scheduling policies, so that traffic from different customers or applications can be shaped independently even when a downstream link is temporarily oversubscribed. Successive Jericho generations have scaled both bandwidth and buffer capacity while extending programmability for new encapsulation and telemetry needs. Within Broadcom's lineup, Jericho sits opposite Tomahawk: where Tomahawk is optimized for the dense, relatively uniform, low-latency traffic of a data center spine-leaf fabric, Jericho is optimized for the variable, congestion-prone traffic of carrier backbones, broadband aggregation, and large enterprise WAN edges. Compared to routing silicon from other vendors, Jericho is notable for combining router-class features with switch-like port density, letting a single chip serve roles that once required separate switching and routing platforms. In practice, telecom operators and large enterprises deploy Jericho-based routers at network edges and cores where they must aggregate traffic from thousands of subscribers or sites and enforce differentiated service levels, such as guaranteeing bandwidth for business customers while fairly sharing remaining capacity among others. The chip's buffering and scheduling capabilities are also used to build backbone routers that must tolerate transient congestion during traffic surges or partial outages without dropping high-priority packets. The cost of this capability is complexity and expense relative to simpler switch silicon: Jericho-based systems are generally more expensive per port than Tomahawk-based data center switches, and their advanced features are largely wasted in environments with uniform, well-provisioned traffic. Data center operators building GPU or server fabrics with predictable, high-bandwidth flows typically choose Tomahawk-class silicon instead, reserving Jericho for the edges of the network where traffic variability and service differentiation actually matter. Network architects who mix both chip families in one organization often place Jericho-based routers at the boundary between their own network and the public internet or a partner network, while keeping Tomahawk-based switches confined to the internal fabric where every device is under their own operational control and traffic patterns are far more predictable.
Key Features
- Deep on-chip and external buffering for sustained congestion tolerance
- Hierarchical quality-of-service scheduling for differentiated customer traffic
- Rich routing feature set including tunneling and complex encapsulation
- Router-class functionality combined with switch-like port density
- Designed for carrier backbone, edge, and broadband aggregation roles
- Scales bandwidth and buffer depth across successive chip generations
- Supports fine-grained traffic shaping across shared network infrastructure
- Positioned opposite Tomahawk within Broadcom's switch silicon portfolio