Fortinet claims it is still the only security vendor to develop its own processors based on custom ASIC chips. Company executives call this two-decade-old strategy the vendor’s “unique differentiator” and say they plan to continue investing in it moving forward.

The security giant now has three families of security ASICs including its Network Processor for hyperscale and network functions,  its Content Processor for protection, and its Security Processing Unit (SPU) for efficiency. Fortinet claims those purpose-built processors allow 4 to 47 times better performance than the industry average.

Fortinet CMO and EVP of Product John Maddison said the vendor uses those security processors to power its next-generation firewall (NGFW) products.

For entry-level NGFWs, Fortinet uses only its own system-on-a-chip (SoC), but for NGFWs used in data centers and with hyperscalers, the vendor uses both its own processors and off-the-shelf chips used by other security vendors, including those from Broadcom, AMD, and Intel, Maddison told SDxCentral.

The latest addition to the Fortinet ASIC family is FortiSP5, designed to power its next generation of entry and mid-range FortiGate firewalls.

“This new SoC-based FortiASIC has secure compute power ratings for major network security functions like firewall and VPN throughputs that are 17 to 32 times greater than the average of our competitors’ similarly priced models using general purpose CPUs, and doubles the ASIC chip acceleration of applications to 14, such as Zero Trust, SASE, 5G, and SD-Branch, with much better performance and efficiency,” Fortinet CEO Ken Xie touted during the vendor’s latest earnings call.

Why Fortinet Designs Its Own Chip

Designing its own Arm-based ASICs for Fortinet’s products gives the company “huge advantages,” Maddison claims.

“Traditional CPU-based solutions are very inefficient in supporting both networking and security,” Fortinet CFO Keith Jensen said. “That's why Fortinet developed proprietary ASIC technology to build an application-specific solution.”

This strategy also helped Fortinet gain firewall market shares. “It's no accident that we've gone from being 10% market share of shipments to almost 50%,” Maddison said. “These ASICs have a big part to play in that.”

Xie also quoted IDC’s recent data on unit shipments of firewall appliances, which shows Fortinet holds the No. 1 units shipped market share position at 48%. This provides “Fortinet with an attractive economy of scale position as well as making it difficult for competitors to develop their own ASIC technology due to high entry barriers and the significant investment that is required,” he said.

Maddison concurred, saying that “I don't think many people would want to try and put that investment in right now, so I think it's going to be a unique differentiator for us.”

Maddison noted Fortinet will continue to invest in custom chips. “We'll keep investing in next-generation ASICs for the entry and the high-end systems.”

Pros and Cons of Custom Chips

Fortinet executives noted from the vendor perspective, the custom ASIC is a huge investment, which takes a long time to see the returns.

“You're designing a chip, you're building it out, you need to integrate it into the software, into the management systems, [and] you need to go through your product line and eventually upgrade that, so it's a massive investment for us,” Maddison said.

Additionally, Xie explained it takes three to six months to put ASICs into a new product, so he sees it as “a long-term positive impact, instead of short-term.”

But, Maddison noted that the returns are worth it, because Fortinet-designed ASICs can help increase performance and speed, while lowering the cost and the power consumption.

“General CPUs, you can put all the applications on there, but they're not optimized for security applications,” he said. “This SoC allows us to run all our applications and all the security capabilities on there, so it gives us a much more security-focus product.”

Additionally, it offers cost-saving and supply-chain benefits with a large number of shipments.

“Once we design it and then we have someone tape it out for us and build it, we can forward-order millions versus tens of thousands. And that gets us more price leverage,” Maddison said. “Since it’s a system on a chip, it replaces numerous components you'd have to source through other vendors, so it really does give us a massive advantage in the supply chain.”

Fortinet learned a lesson about supply chain constraint challenges in the past few years and now uses a dual-sourcing system for almost every component. As the supply chain issue continues to improve, “we've made that massive investment in the supply chain, we'll come out of it much faster than anybody else,” he added.