Patent ID: 7193994

Claim:
A system adapted to synchronize a crossbar switch fabric of a network switch having a plurality of modules, the crossbar switch fabric residing on a switch module and operating on data cells received from line card modules over serial communication paths of the switch, the system comprising: a selector having a plurality of inputs, an output and a selection line; a plurality of ring buffers configured to absorb skew introduced into the communication paths, a first ring buffer coupled to the selection line of the selector and configured to hold configuration information delivered from an arbiter of the switch, and a plurality of second ring buffers, each second ring buffer coupled to an input of the selector and configured to hold a stream of data cells transmitted from a source line card module; a plurality of pointers associated with each ring buffer, the pointers comprising a write pointer that references an address at which to store information in the ring buffer and a read pointer that references an address at which to retrieve information from the ring buffer; and a plurality of control signals configured to initialize the read and write pointers associated with each ring buffer.