A high-performance switch fabric for integrated circuit and packet switching

Abstract

An architecture is described for a high-performance switching fabric that can accommodate circuit-switched and packet-switched traffic in a unified manner. The switch fabric is self-routing and uses fixed-length minipackets within the switching fabric for all types of connections. Its architecture provides full input/output connectivity paths with FIFO (first-in-first-out) queueing at each output. The connection paths are non-overlapping, so there is no internal blocking. Because of output queueing, there is also practically no output port blocking. The uniformity in architecture allows the construction of any size fabric from a single basic module which could be realized on a single chip. Larger-size configurations can be realized either as single-stage configuration.<>