Patent ID: 7420969

Claim:
A method of routing network traffic, comprising; receiving a serial data stream of cells or data packets at an input layer, each cell of said data stream of cells including data and a header to designate a destination device; routing a selected cell to a specified queue that corresponds to said destination device of said selected cell, and filling said queue with a predetermined number of cells, forming a queue of serially received cells; and when said predetermined number of cells is reached, transposing said serially received cells into an alternative parallel format in which all of said serially received cells in said queue may be accessed on an equal basis regardless of the original order in which said serially received cells were first serially received; sorting or not sorting or modifying or duplicating parallel format cells based upon predetermined cell header criteria and/or predetermined order of cell serial arrival criteria; and transposing said sorted or not sorted or modified or duplicated parallel format cells back into a serial format; and delivering said selected cell to a selected output layer circuit within a set of output layer circuits, said selected output layer circuit corresponding to said destination device of said selected cell; wherein said input layer, an intermediate layer, and an output layer are formed on a single semiconductor substrate, a network switch being configurable to enable a first region of said single semiconductor substrate selected from said input layer, said intermediate layer and said output layer, while disabling two regions of said single semiconductor substrate selected from said input layer, said intermediate layer and said output layer.