Cavium and XPliant intro fully programmable switch silicon family scaling to 3.2 terabits per second

SAN JOSE, USA: Cavium Inc. and XPliant Inc., a fabless Ethernet switch silicon provider, have introduced the CNX880xx line of Ethernet switch chips featuring the revolutionary XPliant Packet Architecture (patent pending) (XPA) – an industry first, delivering no-compromise, high packet throughput on a fully programmable switch architecture.

Cavium announced on July 30, 2014 a definitive agreement to acquire XPliant.

Global mobile data traffic will increase nearly 11-fold between 2013 and 2018 (61 percent CAGR), while cloud data center IP traffic will more than double between 2014 and 2017 (30 percent CAGR) according to Cisco's Visual Networking Index and Global Cloud Index. Software Defined Networking, virtualization and faster link speeds continue to emerge as the architectural solutions to alleviate these issues.

Performance: Dell'Oro is forecasting connections faster than 10G (25, 40, 50, 100G and beyond) will increase at an annual rate of 60 percent to $8.2 billion by 2018.

Flexibility: Data center networks need to be more agile, to support SDN and NFV initiatives. IDC predicts SDN will grow at over 89 percent annually, reaching $8 billion by 2018.

Flexibility using the XPA will allow new protocols to be implemented in weeks, not years.