Broadcom announced four new chips in its Sentry5 system-on-chip processor family, at the Embedded Processor forum this week in San Jose, CA. The chips, which are intended for “secured switch” applications such as gateways and routers, feature hardware-accelerated security along with fast Ethernet switching, and are supported with embedded Linux software development kits.

Chips introduced this week include the BCM5365, BCM5365P, BCM5830, and BCM5834 which, according to Broadcom, represent the first silicon devices in the industry to integrate key on-chip technologies such as 10/100 Mbit Ethernet switches, IPsec processing, and a 200 MHz MIPS-32 RISC microprocessor into a single system-on-a-chip device. The higher end devices (the BCM5830 and BCM5834) also include hardware-based Internet Key Exchange (IKE) acceleration. Other on-chip functions include Flash and Synchronous/DDR DRAM controllers, USB ports (host/device), general purpose I/O pins, and a PCI expansion bus interface.

According to Broadcom, the new chips are supported by a software development kit (SDK) that includes drivers, application programming interface, and Linux board support package (BSP). The BSP is also available integrated with MontaVista Linux. Additionally, an open source Linux application software reference library is available for the processors, which provides routing, firewall, NAT, DMZ hosting, and web-based console management, and which includes a hardware-accelerated FreeSWAN IPsec stack for VPN applications, the company said. Router and PCI hardware reference designs are also available.

 
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