A small high-bandwidth ATM switch

The Tiny Tera is an all-CMOS 320 Gbps, input-queued ATM switch suitable for non-ATM applications such as the core of an Internet router. The Tiny Tera efficiently supports both unicast and multicast traffic. Instead of using optical switching technology, we achieve a high switching-bandwidth by using less expensive and proven CMOS technology. Because of limitations in memory and interconnection bandwidths, we believe that to achieve such a high-bandwidth switch requires an innovative architecture. By using Virtual Output Queueing (VOQ) and novel scheduling algorithms, the Tiny Tera will achieve a maximum throughput close to 100% without the need for internal speedup.