Recently, Broadcom Corporation (AVGO) announced the commercial availability of its BCM81343 chip. The chip is a dual 400G MACSec PHY with AES-256 designed to meet the security requirements of high-speed interconnects in modern network infrastructures including hyperscale, cloud, service providers and enterprise networks. The BCM81343 extends on the previous generation dual 100G MACSec PHY with dual bandwidth 400G ports that triple the switching bandwidth capability and supports IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) for time-sensitive transactions and mission-critical tasks to provide accurate clock timing.

Cloud and service provider networks are rapidly transitioning to 400G Ethernet to support growing bandwidth demands and emerging 5G services. A large number of cloud and 5G applications require hardware-based MACSec functionality to protect high-speed data links and accurate timestamps to ensure high reliability and quality of service. Broadcom’s BCM81343 is the industry’s first dual 400G MACSec PHY device, enabling cloud and service providers to maximize the port throughput of the latest 12.8Tb/s switches such as Broadcom’s Tomahawk®3, Jericho 2 and Trident 4. The BCM81343 also helps ensure high-speed data link security between servers, switches and routers while providing the accurate PTP timestamps required for 5G services.

Highlights of the BCM81343 include: Dual 400GbE PHY supports CDAUI8 and CDAUI4 electrical interfaces for QSFP-DD and OSFP optical modules, supports MACSec in 10G to 400G applications, 400G retiming and 400G <-> 100G (reverse gearbox) applications MACSec is supported in both, IEEE 802.1AE 256-bit MACSec supports data rates from 10G to 400G, IEEE 1588 supports the highest Class-C to meet stringent 5G timing requirements, and low-power 16nm CMOS technology.