Broadcom today announced a major update to its Jericho routing chipset with higher speeds and more security.

The Jericho2c+ boasts up to 14.4 Tb/s of routing while supporting integrated security at line speeds. The newly revised routing chip is built on a 7-nanometer manufacturing process and is aimed at high-line rate use cases including data center interconnect, edge routing, and disaggregated routing.

"Jericho2c+ is the industry's highest-performing routing chip," said Gadi Singer, senior product line manager at Broadcom, in an interview with SDxCentral. The chip claims three-times the performance while consuming half the power of the Jericho2 platform, he added.

One of the key improvements to the chip is the addition of media access control security (MACsec). MACsec is often used to secure off-premise connectivity in applications like data center interconnect.

"We're seeing the growing requirement to secure all data going off premises," Singer said. "The current generation Jericho2 uses external MAC and [physical layer] to implement MACsec."

According to Singer, by integrating MACsec security into the chip, two Jericho2c+ chips can deliver a 36-port, 400 Gb/s Ethernet line card — each chip supports up to 18 ports at 400 Gb/s — with integrated security. Previously, this would have required two Jericho2 chips and 19 dedicated MAC chips for a total of 21 chips per line card.

And when combined with Broadcom's Ramon switching chip, Singer claims the Jericho2c+ is capable of offering more than 300 Tb/s of throughput on a single chassis. These capabilities, in concert with the smaller manufacturing process, help the Jericho2c+ achieve a 50% reduction in power consumption over the now two-year-old Jericho2.

"Power is becoming more and more a factor for our end customer's decision," Singer explained. "If you look at, especially the data center, [massively scaled data center], everything that they spend on the network is less that they can put on the servers and sell hosting or whatever they sell."

Singer also noted that "Jercho2c+ is a more optimized solution all the way to the service provider edge."

The new product is currently sampling to qualified customers, with products shipping by the end of the year.