Compact High Speed Cmos Crossbar For Switching Fabrics

: A crossbar is the central element in the design of a non blocking switching fabric. The most common implementation of a crossbar proposed in the litterature uses a non blocking multistage network based on elementary k \Theta k switches where usual values of k are small (2 to 4). Generally, such elementary switches allow only unidirectional routing. In this paper we present the design semi-custom arbitrary bidirectional n \Theta n synchronous crossbar macro-block that can be used both for complete or multistage emulation crossbar based router architectures. Several points related to the feasibility are pointed out: logical design, layout generation and performances. 1 Introduction It is known that networking of computing systems has been and still is an important research and industrial activity. Examples of networking range from sample standard bus coupling for few processors based systems, to broad band ISDN coupling of geographically distant computer systems [8]. Novel architectu..