Understanding Crossbar Switch Fabrics
James Aweya · 2019
Chapter 2 discusses the basic design concepts, architectures, and implementation issues when using crossbar switch fabrics in network devices. The bandwidth and high-throughput requirements of high-performance systems has called for solutions to the limitations of the single or parallel multi-drop shared-bus and shared-memory switch fabrics. Crossbar switch fabrics, generally, provide both the bandwidth and design flexibility needed to build high-performance network devices, and offer a degree of scalability and reliability not found in the shared-bus-based and shared-memory systems. They are reasonably low cost (using ASICs and standard commercial chips, for example), have excellent scalability, and can be designed to be non-blocking.