loopback0 – Douglas Gourlay's Blog Data Centers, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing

On Merchant Silicon and Lawnmowing

Custom or Merchant Silicon?

Hello there!

I've been on a bit of a vacation the past couple of weeks, so sorry for the slow-down in posting frequency.  But now, I am back at my desk, with a decent speed Internet connection, and too many ideas on what to write about.

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Chance had it that today a friend of mine sent me an email reminding me of a blog post I wrote about a year and a half ago titled - 'On Merchant Silicon and Mowing my Yard.'  It was a piece, purposefully a bit inflammatory, designed to have a bit of a go at the guys who were drawing some interesting comparisons to product lines I worked on.

As often happens, times change.

Reading this email which spoon-fed my prior writings back to me, I had to reflect a bit.  Does merchant silicon matter?  Is it a sell out?  What creates customer value in a networking product?  Is it the silicon, the software, the system as a whole, how it operates with other adjacent products, etc...

Realistically, to me, what most people seem to care about in a switch is that it works, at the performance rates necessary, and that the software is stable and has the features they need to accomplish the networking task at hand.

Inside this system there is a collection of silicon, some of which may be custom, some which comes from vendors other than the systems manufacturer.  The PHYs are almost always 3rd party, the CPUs as well, most every part is always 'merchant silicon' except the switch fabric and the packet processor.  These are custom in some switches, or merchant in others depending on that specific vendors goals for that particular product.

Ethernet continues to evolves and offers lots of opportunities for innovation and improvement - some of these will require new silicon, some will require new software.  Using merchant silicon sometimes will affect a vendors ability to control the pace and order they bring features to market that require new silicon.  However, with the breadth of silicon available in the market today there are several viable silicon choices.

Custom chips create their own set of challenges - most vendors doing their own chips actually do their own logic and rely on a third party to actually build the chips and fab them out, deal with the process challenges, etc.  The vendors doing full custom take on a high cost burden up front and hope they get enough market traction to enable future R&D in their ASIC teams.  In this period of compressed budgets these programs tend to be one of the first things to get financial focus.    What do you think- is one better than the other, or is a healthy mix appropriate for our maturing industry?

P.S. Oh, and I outsourced yard mowing...  too time consuming and others did a better job than I ever could.