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US 4,901,305 AGranted
Distributed crossbar switch
OwnerGregory L. Tangonaninventor
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Abstract
The Invention provides a locally distributed crossbar switch to optically connect many computer processors and memories in arbitrary permutation an without interruption. A process or and an associated memory can be packaged together, taking advantage of the fact that the distributed crossbar switch employs local switching. At the same time, processor-memory pairs can be physically separated from other such processor-memory pairs, and by great distance.
Claims8
A distributed switching assembly, comprising:
- (a) N transmitter-receiver pairs, wherein each receiver comprises a switched array of N detectors for detecting and selecting a particular transmitted signal, wherein each transmitter-receiver pair is packaged together;
- (b) optical fiber routing means for linking a transmitter and a receiver through
- (c) fanout reformatter means for:
- (i) accepting a signal output from each transmitter by way of the optical fiber routing means;
- (ii) fanning out the signal output from each transmitter from 1 to N branches;
- and
- (iii) reformatting all of the Kth branches, where K is from 1 to N, from each transmitter for providing N inputs to the Kth receiver by way of the optical fiber routing means.
4 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.