Example InterConnect: Star Fabric

Three bridges could be fully interconnected with 2.5Gbps on each link. This could be used to very simply connect racks between Compact PCI chassis in a central office or POP location. In this example, no redesign would be required on existing chassis, boards or software. A front-panel or back-panel module with the Bridge could be inserted into a CPCI slot in each chassis. The chassis could then be interconnected with external shielded twisted pair cables.

To build systems with more than three bus segments a Star would be added. A small Star-based system may look like the illustration above where one Star is interconnected with 6 Bridges. Each bridge supports a full PCI bus bandwidth.

The number and types of configurations are very flexible and can be tuned by the system designer to meet the unique requirements of their application.

In telecom applications, high availability and fault tolerance are extremely important.

With Stars and Bridges, the fabric can be constructed with no single point of failure. In this example topology, a Star is added to the 6 bus segment system shown earlier. This provides redundancy on the links and the Star. If a particular path fails, packets are automatically rerouted in hardware over the remaining good path. An invalid path notification message is sent to the root node so that operations personnel can replace the faulty component.