Spectrum 3 ASIC

Introduced March 2020

Data sheet. A revised datasheet was issued in Sept 2020 to reflect that what was mellanox is now Nvidia/Mellanox. No substantive changes were made to the content of the datasheet.

From March 2020 Nextplatform.com:

With the Spectrum-3, Mellanox is not just moving to 16 nanometer processes from TSMC, but it is also moving from monolithic designs to chiplet designs, just as Intel’s Barefoot Networks division is doing with its Tofino-2 switch ASIC. Specifically, the Spectrum-3 design has a large digital switch surrounded by eight analog SerDes blocks that interface with the ports and therefore the outside world. Mellanox has an ultra-short, high bandwidth interconnect that links the SerDes to the digital switch. The chiplet approach allows Mellanox to design the digital and analog components separately and to push the aggregate switch ASIC beyond the reticle limits of a monolithic design to scale up ASIC bandwidth and functions.