摘要 |
The invention provides a method and system for accessing ports of a very high-speed, fixed-size cell switch fabric. It is aimed at permitting a tradeoff between the overall number of I/Os required to access all the switch ports, that must stay within the board and modules packaging constraints and the maximum speed at which each individual wire, making up ports, may be toggled while not violating any of the speed limitation imposed by the transmission medium (board wiring) or the module interface devices; i.e., receivers and drivers. This is achieved by eliminating the need of having extra control signals, thus, greatly easing the requirement for module and board I/Os. Then, synchronization is obtained from in-band information transported by fixed-size idle logical units from a robust protocol based on two CRCs. The acquisition of synchronization does not require any particular training sequence and is conducted by the receiving device component only which retrieves computed delimiters on which it locks. The method does not assume any overhead and is obtained from the extra bandwidth available while no minimum is ever required after synchronization has been acquired.
|