Non-Blocking Switching Fabric Bandwidth – Official Technical Overview & Hardware Datasheet

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The relentless growth of hyperscale cloud computing, 5G backhaul, and AI-driven data aggregation demands a fundamental shift in switching architecture. Traditional shared bus and blocking fabrics introduce unpredictable latency and throughput bottlenecks under microburst traffic conditions. The non-blocking switching fabric bandwidth architecture eliminates these constraints by providing full-rate, simultaneous communication between all ingress and egress ports.

This document details the technical specifications, hardware implementation, and performance guarantees of our seventh-generation Crossbar + Shared Memory hybrid fabric. Capable of delivering line-rate, lossless switching up to 51.2 Tbps in a single chassis, this architecture ensures that any port can communicate with any other port at wire speed without contention.

ARCHITECTURE & CHASSIS DESIGN

The non-blocking fabric is realized through a distributed, three-stage Clos architecture implemented on redundant fabric cards. Each line card hosts a local switching element (LSE) that interfaces with a central fabric element (CFE).

Key architectural tenets:
– Work-conserving arbitration: A modified iSLIP scheduler achieves 100% throughput under uniform and non-uniform traffic patterns.
– VOQ (Virtual Output Queue) buffering per egress port, preventing Head-of-Line (HOL) blocking.
– Cell-based switching: Ingress packets are disassembled into fixed-size 80-byte cells for deterministic scheduling, then reassembled at egress.
– Cut-through forwarding mode supported for latency-sensitive applications (sub-400ns port-to-port).

HARDWARE FEATURES

1. FABRIC REDUNDANCY: N+1 fabric card redundancy with hitless failover ( Parameter Specification

Form Factor 12RU Centralized Chassis or 7RU Distributed Spine Switching Capacity 51.2 Tbps (full-duplex, non-blocking) Power Supply 3+3 Redundant, Hot-swappable AC (200-240V) or DC (-48V) Fabric Card Slots 6 (N+1 redundancy active standard) Per-Slot Bandwidth 3.2 Tbps bidirectional Operating Temperature 0°C to 45°C (derated above 1800m altitude) Max Power Consumption 2850W (fully loaded line cards & fabric)

ORDERING OPTIONS

Base Chassis SKU: NBS-7K-48-SLOT (48 line card slots)
Fabric Card SKUs:
– NBS-FAB-S3 (3.2 Tbps, base)
– NBS-FAB-S6 (6.4 Tbps, high-capacity)
– NBS-FAB-R (Redundant, hot-swappable)
Line Card Compatibility: All NBS-7K series line cards (1GE to 400GE interfaces).

Optional Accessories:
– Front-to-rear airflow kit
– AC/DC power shelf (3+3 or N+1)
– Fabric extension cable set (inter-chassis linking)