Architects' Tech Alliance
Aug 24, 2026 · Fundamentals
What’s Inside a Switch? A Hardware Teardown and Packet Journey Explained
The article dissects a network switch to reveal its core ASIC, PHY chips, packet buffer, CAM‑based MAC address table, CPU and management ports, then follows a data frame through learning, table lookup, and forwarding decisions—including unicast, unknown‑unicast flood, broadcast/multicast flood and filtering—while noting advanced features such as static MAC entries and MAC‑migration suppression.
ASICMAC learningnetwork hardware
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