MULTI-STAGE INTERCONNECTION NETWORKS HAVING SMALLER MEMORY REQUIREMENTS

摘要

In one embodiment, a multistage interconnection network (MIN) has two or more configurable stages, each stage having a plurality of switches. The network has one or more unused input terminals, each mapped using fixed switch connections to an unused output terminal. The network also has a set of used input terminals that are selectively mapped to a set of used output terminals based on values of control signals supplied to the stages. Each stage receives a different control signal, and each control signal is generated by cyclically shifting a control seed by a corresponding cyclic-shift value. Fixing the mappings of the unused terminals ensures that the used input terminals are not mapped to any unused output terminals. By storing only the control seed, memory requirements are reduced over networks that explicitly store individual control signals for all of the stages.