Table of Contents
- Overview
- Common Merchant Silicon Families Used by Arista
- Benefits of Merchant Silicon in Arista Routers
- Evolution and Advancements in Merchant Silicon
- Historical Milestones
- Conclusion
Arista Routers: Merchant Silicon Chipsets — Overview
What Is Merchant Silicon in Arista Routers?
Merchant silicon refers to high-performance networking chips—known as ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits)—that are sold to any equipment vendor by large, third-party chip companies. Instead of designing their own proprietary silicon from scratch, companies like Arista use these commercially available chipsets (primarily from Broadcom) to power the forwarding and routing functions inside their switches and routers.
This approach is in contrast to traditional networking giants who often relied on custom, in-house silicon designed for their own products. Merchant silicon chipsets are engineered for flexibility, scale, and fast innovation, and have become a key enabler in Arista’s platform evolution.
Why Is Merchant Silicon Important?
Understanding merchant silicon matters for several reasons:
- Performance and Scalability: Merchant silicon chipsets benefit from huge R&D investments and Moore’s Law, so they deliver consistent improvements in speed, port density, and features.
- Cost Efficiency: The large volume production reduces hardware costs, making advanced networking more accessible and affordable.
- Rapid Time-to-Market: Because these chipsets are quickly updated, Arista can refresh its hardware lines and add new capabilities faster than if it built its own silicon from the ground up.
- Ecosystem Alignment: With open, standards-based chips, it’s easier to achieve interoperability and support multi-vendor environments, a must for modern data centers and carriers.
- Software Consistency: Arista’s EOS (Extensible Operating System) runs uniformly across all platforms using merchant silicon, which streamlines testing, operations, and training.
How Merchant Silicon Works in Arista Routers
Merchant silicon chipsets are at the heart of Arista routers and switches. Here’s how they fit into the bigger picture:
- Packet Processing: The merchant silicon ASIC handles the heavy lifting—fast packet forwarding, traffic buffering, flow management, and applying Access Control Lists (ACLs), Quality of Service (QoS), and switching/routing policies at line speed.
- Hardware Abstraction: Arista’s EOS software interacts with the different hardware chips using abstraction layers. This means the same software image and features work consistently, regardless of the underlying silicon family (such as Broadcom Trident, Tomahawk, or Jericho).
- Feature Enablement: Modern merchant silicon includes programmable elements, deep packet buffers, large forwarding tables, and support for advanced protocols (like VXLAN, MPLS, EVPN), enabling Arista devices to function in a wide range of roles (from leaf/spine to core and edge routers).
- Hardware Refresh and Upgrades: As chip vendors launch new generations, Arista can adopt them quickly, bringing high bandwidth (100G, 400G, and beyond) and modernized features to customers with minimal disruption.
Merchant silicon enables Arista routers to keep pace with the most demanding networking environments—cloud scale, hyperscale data centers, and leading service providers—without the tradeoffs and lag associated with proprietary hardware approaches. It is foundational to Arista’s agility, performance, and consistency across its hardware portfolio.
Common Merchant Silicon Families Used by Arista
Arista leverages several key merchant silicon chipsets from leading vendors, primarily Broadcom, to power its high-performance routing and switching platforms. These chipsets offer varying features suited for different use cases—from enterprise campus switches to high-bandwidth data center core routers. Below is an overview of the major merchant silicon families used by Arista:
| Chipset Family | Vendor | Typical Use Cases | Arista Platforms (Examples) | Notable Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trident | Broadcom | Enterprise & Campus, Data Center Leaf switches | 7050X, 7050X2, 7050X4 | High port density, VXLAN support, programmable pipelines |
| Tomahawk | Broadcom | High Bandwidth Data Center Networks | 7300X4 Series | 100G/400G scaling, high throughput performance |
| Jericho | Broadcom | Service Provider, Deep Buffer Routing | 7500R, 7280R Series | Deep buffers, advanced routing protocols, large scale |
| Fulcrum | Fulcrum (formerly) | Early Arista 10G switches | Early Arista platforms | Low latency, integrated MAC/PHY |
| DNX | Broadcom | Service Provider Routing | 7800 Series, 7280 Series | Large forwarding tables, advanced QoS, scalable architecture |
These merchant silicon choices allow Arista to flexibly address diverse networking needs with consistent software – Arista EOS – across multiple hardware platforms.
Benefits of Merchant Silicon in Arista Routers
Arista’s adoption of merchant silicon chipsets brings several important advantages that drive innovation, efficiency, and scalability in modern networking:
- Cost Efficiency: By using commercially available merchant silicon, Arista reduces the capital expenditure (CAPEX) associated with building proprietary ASICs, enabling more competitive pricing while maintaining high performance.
- Rapid Innovation: Merchant silicon vendors invest heavily in chip R&D, resulting in faster cadence of new features, increased port speeds, and improved power efficiency that Arista can quickly integrate into its platforms.
- Broad Feature Support: Modern merchant ASICs support advanced capabilities such as deep packet buffers, extensive forwarding tables, complex quality of service (QoS), programmable pipelines, and integrated security features—empowering Arista routers to serve diverse networking needs.
- Software Consistency: Arista’s EOS network operating system runs uniformly on all merchant silicon platforms, simplifying development, testing, and customer deployment by ensuring consistent behavior and features across hardware generations.
- Deployment Flexibility: Multiple merchant silicon options allow Arista to offer tailored routing and switching solutions—from data center leaf and spine switches to service provider edge routers—all leveraging the same software ecosystem.
These combined benefits enable Arista to deliver high-performance, scalable, and cost-effective networking solutions that meet the evolving demands of modern data centers and service provider networks.
Evolution and Advancements in Merchant Silicon
The evolution of merchant silicon has fundamentally transformed modern routing and switching architectures, particularly for Arista’s networking platforms. Here’s how merchant silicon has advanced over time and the impact on Arista solutions:
-
Continuous Performance Gains:
Each new generation of merchant silicon, closely following Moore’s Law, has delivered increased forwarding capacity, higher port speeds (e.g., 100G/400G/800G), larger routing tables, and greater feature sets—all at lower cost and power consumption per bit.
As a result, Arista platforms have steadily increased density and performance for both switching and routing roles.
For example, the R-series can now scale to 576 ports of 400G in a single system. -
Expanded Use Cases and Modern Architectures:
The flexibility of merchant silicon has enabled Arista to offer not just traditional data center switches, but also cloud-grade core routers, service provider edge devices, and multi-cloud connectivity solutions.
These advancements provide deep buffers, quality of service (QoS), integrated encryption, and leading hardware support for automation and visibility tools. -
Software-Driven Innovation:
Merchant silicon evolution has allowed Arista to unify its platforms around a single software image—EOS—delivering operational consistency, simplified upgrades, and rapid feature adoption across hardware generations.
Abstraction techniques and NetDevOps automation capabilities further speed up deployments and modernize network operations. -
Rapid Time-to-Market and Open Ecosystems:
Leveraging the pace of merchant silicon innovation, Arista accelerates platform launches compared to legacy custom ASICs. This allows the company to frequently introduce new features, security enhancements, and efficiency improvements that are industry-aligned.
Open standards and interoperability are also enhanced, making it easier for networks to adapt to evolving requirements.
Arista’s strategy—to ride the wave of merchant silicon advancements—has brought cloud-scale benefits to a wide range of customers, from hyperscalers to enterprises and service providers, empowering them to transition from legacy monolithic routers to agile, cost-efficient, and automated network solutions.[1][2][5]
Historical Milestones
The adoption and advancement of merchant silicon in Arista routers have marked several important milestones throughout networking history. Below is a chronological table outlining pivotal events and technologies that have shaped Arista’s journey with merchant silicon chipsets:
| Year | Milestone Event |
|---|---|
| 2008 | Introduction of the first ultra-low-latency 24-port 10G switch based on merchant silicon—establishing a foundation for high-performance Arista platforms. |
| 2010 | Launch of large buffer 10G chipsets with Virtual Output Queuing (VOQ) architecture, improving congestion management in network switches. |
| 2011 | Market entry of the first 64-port 10G single-chip switch, vastly increasing port density and cost efficiency. |
| 2013–2016 | Adoption of Broadcom Jericho merchant silicon in Arista's high-scale routing platforms, enabling massive scalability and rich feature sets. |
| 2020+ | Release and deployment of next-generation 400G-class merchant silicon such as Trident 4, Tomahawk 4, and Jericho2+, pushing the limits of bandwidth, efficiency, and programmability. |
These milestones reflect Arista’s ongoing evolution, leveraging merchant silicon to steadily enhance network scalability, performance, and hardware versatility across enterprise and service provider environments.
Conclusion
Throughout this blog post, we have explored how Arista leverages merchant silicon to deliver cutting-edge networking solutions that scale efficiently across diverse deployment scenarios. From understanding the common merchant silicon families like Broadcom’s Trident, Tomahawk, and Jericho series, to appreciating the significant benefits such as cost efficiency, rapid innovation, and software consistency, it’s clear how merchant silicon has become a foundational element of Arista’s success.
We also dove into the evolution of merchant silicon technology — highlighting continuous improvements in performance, scalability, and features — and reviewed key historical milestones that have shaped the modern networking landscape.
By embracing merchant silicon, Arista enables customers ranging from hyperscale data centers to service providers and enterprises to build networks that are agile, programmable, and future-proof.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into Arista’s networking architecture. If you enjoyed this post or have questions, feel free to leave a comment or reach out. Stay tuned for more insights into the technology powering tomorrow’s networks!