Patent ID: 7088711

Claim:
An electrical router backplane comprising: a first plurality of card slots, each configured for mating with the backplane electrical connector sets of a packet input/output card to couple electrical signals from that packet input/output card to a corresponding set of signaling thru-holes in the backplane; a second plurality of card slots comprising at least three card slots, each configured for mating with the backplane electrical connector sets of a switch fabric card to couple electrical signals from that switch fabric card to a corresponding set of signaling thru-holes in the backplane; and multiple embedded high-speed signaling layers, each sandwiched between corresponding upper and lower dielectric material layers separating that signaling layer respectively from upper and lower ground planes, each high-speed signaling layer comprising differential trace pairs, each trace pair forming point-to-point connections between two pairs of the signaling thru-holes, such that, collectively, the high-speed signaling layers contain at least two differential trace pairs to connect each first card slot with each second card slot.