400G forwarding - how does it work?

Wed Jul 27 19:30:07 UTC 2022

On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 at 15:11, Masataka Ohta
<mohta at necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote:
>
> James Bensley wrote:
>
> > The BCM16K documentation suggests that it uses TCAM for exact
> > matching (e.g.,for ACLs) in something called the "Database Array"
> > (with 2M 40b entries?), and SRAM for LPM (e.g., IP lookups) in
> > something called the "User Data Array" (with 16M 32b entries?).
>
> Which documentation?
>
> According to:
>
>         https://docs.broadcom.com/docs/16000-DS1-PUB
>
> figure 1 and related explanations:
>
>         Database records 40b: 2048k/1024k.
>         Table width configurable as 80/160/320/480/640 bits.
>         User Data Array for associated data, width configurable as
>         32/64/128/256 bits.
>
> means that header extracted by 88690 is analyzed by 16K finally
> resulting in 40b (a lot shorter than IPv6 addresses, still may be
> enough for IPv6 backbone to identify sites) information by "database"
> lookup, which is, obviously by CAM because 40b is painful for
> SRAM, converted to "32/64/128/256 bits data".

Hi Masataka,

Yes I had read that data sheet. If you have 2M 40b entries in CAM, you
could also have 1M 80 entries (or a mixture); the 40b CAM blocks can
be chained together to store IPv4/IPv6/MPLS/whatever entries.

Cheers,
James.