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Lucent Technologies Inc.
Advance Product Brief
March 1997
ATM Crossbar Element (ACE)
LUC4AC01
S
LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES—PROPRIETARY
Use pursuant to Company Instructions
Description
(continued)
Overview
As shown in Figure 2, data for each port is clocked into
an input processor, and then routed to the appropriate
output processor. The routing and arbitration circuit,
and backpressure feedback generation circuit control
the movement of data into and out of the crossbar ele-
ments. Control and status is communicated through a
16-bit asynchronous microprocessor interface.
Figure 3 shows an example 16 x 16 ATLANTA-based
switch fabric. The switch fabric will switch any of the 16
inputs to any of the 16 outputs. This is achieved by
staging devices and is referred to as a three-stage
switch fabric. The input stage is called the
(expander), and the output stage is called the
stage
(concentrator). The ACE is functionally similar to
the ASX, but without the internal cell buffer (a hand-
shake protocol between the ASX and the ACE ensures
that the ACE need not store data). Conceptually, the
first stage ASX expands the number of paths available
for switching the data, while the third stage concen-
trates data from the center stage.
first stage
third
A three-stage ASX/ACE based switch fabric can sup-
port up to 40 ports with 622 Mbits/s I/O rates. A 40-port
(25 Gbits/s total ATM throughput) fabric design would
use eight devices per stage in a 5:8 expansion mode.
5-4523R5
Figure 3. Example 16 x 16 @ 622 Mbits/s Switch Fabric (10 Gbits/s throughput)
ASX
MODULE #0
ASX
MODULE #1
ASX
MODULE #2
ASX
MODULE #3
ACE
MODULE #0
ACE
MODULE #1
ACE
MODULE #2
ASX
MODULE #0
ASX
MODULE #1
ASX
MODULE #2
ASX
MODULE #3
INPUT FROM
PORT CARDS
OUTPUT TO
PORT CARDS
FIRST-STAGE EXPANDER
THIRD-STAGE CONCENTRATOR
CENTER-STAGE CROSSBAR
ACE
MODULE #3