SCALABLE HIGH PERFORMANCE SWITCH ELEMENT FOR A SHARED MEMORY PACKET OR ATM CELL SWITCH FABRIC

摘要

A scalable highperformance ATM cell/packetswitch (HiPAS) elementfor a shared memory switchfabric application. The switchclement includes a PAC Bus(Packet/ATM Cell Bus) andthe Switch Fabric ControllerBus (SC Bus). The HiPASswitch element receivesand transmits the ATMcells/packets through the PACBus. The PAC Bus providesindependent parallel datapathsfor the receive port andtransmit port. The PAC Busprovides a unique structuralfeature to the HiPAS switchelement and allows expansionto the switch capacity in amanner similar to a bit-sliceprocessor. Multiple numberof HiPAS switch elements canbe concatenated to expand thecapacity. In the concatenatedconfiguration, the datapaths ofthe receive port and transmitport are interleaved so thatthe interconnection remainspoint-to-point. As the result, all of the switch ports in the switch executethe cell transactions concurrently on the PAC Bus. In addition,each switch fabric port has a dedicated serial port to exchange statusinformation between the switch fabric and the switch port adapter.