A new bus assignment in a designed shared bus switch fabric

This work presents an architecture for a cell switch fabric, which has a modular structure with a chip partitioning oriented to avoid the system falling down totally, achieving expandability and increasing reuse. Different algorithms for the bus assignment are discussed in this paper, and the common bus is assigned in a cyclic and rotative way and cells segmented in microcells. The cell switch fabric is built on PCBs where every one has a capacity; for four ports at 164.323 Mbps, the external port rate is 155.52 Mbps. A microcontroller, in the card, can communicate with a PC, which runs a test, verification and CSF configuration program. It can switch the bus operation frequency and measures some parameters of the CSF behavior. Each port was implemented on a CPLD FLEX10K100 and the Switch Control Block on a circuit MAX7128, both from Altera Company.