Patent ID: 7212523

Claim:
An architecture for a Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) cross-connect switching system, comprising: an input bus; an output bus; at least one OR gate; and a pipeline structure having a plurality of M pipeline stages, each stage comprising a respective TDM cross-connect switch, the pipeline structure being communicably coupled between the input bus and the OR gate, the OR gate being communicably coupled between the pipeline structure and the output bus, wherein each of the pipelined M TDM cross-connect switches is operative to successively receive M sets of N groups of data, and to perform N-to-1 selections on the respective M sets of N data groups to generate corresponding sets of N groups of switched data, each TDM cross-connect switch being further operative to perform M-to-1 selections on the respective M sets of N switched data groups, thereby effectively performing N×M-to-1 selections on the M sets of N data groups, and wherein the OR gate is operative to receive the M sets of N switched data groups from the M TDM cross-connect switches, to perform a logical OR operation on the switched data groups, and to provide the logical OR'd data to the output bus.