Merchant Silicon refers to switching and routing chips sold by third-party vendors, such as Broadcom's Tomahawk and Jericho families, rather than ASICs a switch maker designs in-house. Because many switches share the same underlying chip, merchant silicon has standardised data-center forwarding capabilities, accelerated speed transitions to 400G and 800G, and enabled the white-box market.
Category: Network & Connectivity · Subcategory: Data Center Network Architecture · Part of the AIDC Technical Terminology reference.