Podcast EP358: How Custom Silicon Development Allowed Cisco to Fuel New Innovation for Its Customers
Daniel is joined by Nick Kucharewski Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cisco’s silicon development organization. In this role he is responsible for the end-to-end strategy, cross-functional execution, organization alignment, and product roadmap for Silicon One, Cisco’s uniquely scalable and programmable networking product family. Nick has over 25 years of experience in networking, spanning the evolution of the communications silicon market over the past three decades. He has worked as a chip design engineer, engineering manager, product manager, and general manager. His work has contributed to silicon and software product innovations across AI & cloud infrastructure, wireless networking, optics, enterprise switching, carrier routing, and broadband access.
In this broad discussion, Dan explores Cisco’s early and pioneering move to build custom silicon in-house. This happened when most other providers were using ASIC suppliers. Nick describes the strategy behind this move and the significant resulting benefits. He explains some of these benefits in significant detail. Much of it relates to the ability to deliver hardware that can adapt to the ever-changing system requirements driven by AI deployment and the need for more robust security.
Nick describes how custom silicon development allowed Cisco to deliver a flexible, programmable network fabric that opened new innovation opportunities for its customers. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in these podcasts belong solely to the speaker, and not to the speaker’s employer, organization, committee or any other group or individual.
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