SIGNAL ACQUIRED — 51.2 TBPS

The Invisible
Backbone

Every packet you have ever sent crossed silicon you will never see.
We make that silicon.

01 / SEMICONDUCTOR SOLUTIONS

Silicon that moves
the world’s traffic

Three disciplines, one substrate. Switching decides where packets go, connectivity decides how fast light carries them, and custom accelerators decide how fast machines learn. None of it is visible. All of it is load-bearing.

Broadcom BCM78900 Tomahawk-class Ethernet switch chip on its package substrate

FIG. 01 — SWITCH SILICON, SHOWN AT ROUGHLY DIE SCALE

02 / 01 — SWITCHING

One die, fifty-one
trillion bits

Tomahawk 5 switches 51.2 terabits per second through a single package — the simultaneous traffic of a small country, routed by a chip that rests on two fingers. Hyperscale data centers are built around it by the thousand, and each generation doubles the last without doubling the power.

The internet does not have a center. It has several hundred thousand of these, quietly agreeing with each other about where everything goes next.

THROUGHPUT
51.2 Tbps
SERDES
512 × 112G PAM-4
GENERATION
2× IN 24 MONTHS

02 / 02 — CONNECTIVITY

Light, disciplined

Between the switches, light does the traveling — and light, left alone, is noisy. Our PAM-4 DSPs, drivers and coherent optics impose order on photons at 200 gigabits per lane, across a data-center row or an ocean floor, for years without a service visit.

Most of the world’s broadband arrives through our silicon too: cable, fiber, DSL and the set-top boxes that were never glamorous and never failed to matter.

PER LANE
200 Gbps PAM-4
REACH
RACK → TRANSOCEANIC
MEDIA
COPPER / FIBER / RF
TX · ONE FIBER λ₁…λₙ · DWDM RX · NO REGEN

FIG. 02 — MANY COLORS, ONE GLASS THREAD

FIG. 03 — ALL-REDUCE, VISUALIZED AS LIGHT

02 / 03 — CUSTOM AI ACCELERATORS

The computers behind
the computers

The largest AI training runs on Earth are coordinated by custom accelerators we design with — and for — the handful of companies that operate them. XPUs stitched together by our own interconnect, co-packaged optics and switch silicon, drawn as one machine.

You have read their outputs. You have argued with them. You have never seen the machines, and neither has almost anyone who works here.

MODEL
CUSTOM XPU, CO-DESIGNED
FABRIC
SCALE-UP + SCALE-OUT
VISIBILITY
ZERO. BY DESIGN.

02 / INFRASTRUCTURE SOFTWARE

The private cloud’s
operating system

Since 2023 the VMware stack has been ours — the virtualization layer under most of the Fortune 500’s private infrastructure, alongside two decades of enterprise and mainframe software acquisitions. Unseen, like everything else we make.

+ MAINFRAME · ENTERPRISE SECURITY · SYMPOSIA OF LEGACY THAT STILL RUNS THE LEDGERS OF THE WORLD

03 / SCALE OF DEPENDENCY

Dependency is the quietest
form of market share

0%

of all internet traffic crosses Broadcom technology — our own estimate, and we keep the receipts

0Tbps

switched by a single Tomahawk 5 die — shipping specification, not a roadmap

0+

engineers, nearly all of whom you will never hear from — by preference

0yrs

of unbroken semiconductor lineage — HP Associates, 1961 → today

04 / OBSERVED IN THE WILD

You are using us
right now

This page assembled itself locally, in your browser, from your device’s own characteristics. Nothing was sent anywhere. That is rather the point: the less you can see of the infrastructure, the better it is working.

05 / THE PRACTICE

Serious, exact,
unglamorous, essential

No consumer keynotes. No unboxings. No logo on your laptop.

We tape out, we qualify, we ship. The world’s traffic moves a little faster, the power budget holds, and nobody notices.

Nobody noticing is the product.

LINEAGE — 1961 → PRESENT

  1. 1961HP Associates — Hewlett-Packard’s semiconductor arm begins work on optoelectronics
  2. 1991Broadcom Corporation founded by Henry Samueli & Henry Nicholas, out of UCLA
  3. 1999Agilent spins off from HP, carrying the silicon with it
  4. 2005The semiconductor group becomes Avago Technologies
  5. 2016Avago acquires Broadcom and takes the name — the wave mark survives
  6. 2023VMware joins; silicon meets the software substrate
SIGNAL INTEGRITYSERDESLITHOGRAPHYTAPE-OUT THERMALYIELDPROTOCOLFIRMWARE
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