Patent ID: 7039006

Claim:
A board duplexing apparatus for an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch, comprising: a plurality of subscriber modules, each of said plurality of subscriber modules processing ATM cells from a plurality of subscribers; a corresponding plurality of synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) interface cards (SICs) respectively connected to said plurality of subscriber modules, each of said plurality of SICs receiving an SDH frame from a corresponding one of said plurality of subscriber modules at its ingress, extracting a plurality of ATM cells from the received SDH frame, and outputting the extracted cells at its egress; a corresponding plurality of ATM port management cards (APMCs), each of said plurality of APMCs looking up headers of active ones of the ATM cells from said plurality of SICs, appending corresponding routing tags to the headers, and outputting the resulting cells; and a corresponding plurality of switches, each of said plurality of switches switching active ones of the ATM cells from said plurality of APMCs, wherein respective subscriber modules, SICs, APMCs, and switches are connected so as to form a corresponding plurality of parallel paths for processing ATM cells simultaneously therethrough, and wherein ATM cells are re-routed from a primary path to an alternate path of the plurality of paths when a fault is detected in the primary path.