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

This paper describes an architecture for a high‐performance switching fabric that can accommodate circuit‐switched and packet‐switched traffic in a unified manner. The switch fabric is self‐routeing and uses fixed‐length minipackets within the switching fabric for all types of connections. Its kernel architecture is based on a routeing topology with individual connection paths from all inputs to all outputs and with FIFO queuing at each output. Owing to the disjoint connection paths, there is no internal blocking, and because of output queueing, output port blocking is prevented to a great extent. The uniformity in architecture allows 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 or multistage configuration. The second part of this paper discusses performance aspects and gives results and dimensioning guidelines for both circuit‐switched and packet‐switched traffic. Copyright © 1989 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.