The implementation of universal switch fabric for switch and router systems

We developed the universal switch fabric that has the capacity from 160 Gbps to 320 Gbps with serial interconnection at a speed of 2.5 Gbps and has the architecture of coplanar module. The main purpose of the universal switch fabric easily provides redundancy and scalability as adding existed switch modules and overcomes a defect which switch fabric must be modified by changing the network processor on line cards owing to switch interface. This module has many of queuing engine cards, two switch cards with redundancy, a passive backplane and interconnection copper cables. It supports for sophisticated programmable QoS algorithms, distinct handling for both unicast and multicast/broadcast traffic, as well as supporting for IP, POS, and GbE/10 GbE (Gigabit Ethernet). In this paper, we describe the architecture of the universal switch fabric for supporting line rate at 10 Gbps using CSIX interface, which has frequency 250 MHz, 64 bits parallel interface (Aug. 2000). In general, when a network processor on line card is changed, it is impossible that switch fabric is reused without modifying existed fabric module because switch interface is different by vendor. But, because we developed switch fabric module using coplanar method, although the network processor with CSIX interface is changed, we don´t need to change switch fabric module. We also describe the results of a throughput test according to CSIX clock frequency, CSIX data width, a variety of overheads and the maximum payload size of CSIX frame.