Importance

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Abstract

A switching fabric for a high-speed, high-performance digital traffic switch guarantees a high degree of resource availability and is resource efficient. Each input port associated with the switching fabric is assigned a time slot in a repetitive time cycle. Data cells received on input ports are staggered so that they are transmitted through the switching fabric in conformance with the assigned time slots. The time slot arrangement allows small data units associated with a particular cell, as they are forwarded through the switching fabric, to be converted into larger parallel data units which respect cell boundaries. The time slot arrangement further allows several of such larger data units to be written into an output queue in a single clock cycle. Thus, cell contention is avoided while making efficient use of queue space. Cells destined for multiple output ports associated with the switching fabric are written into the fullest output queue associated with one of the destination ports, so that the cell can be read and transmitted to all destination output ports using pointers, without the need to replicate the cell.

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First Claim