Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation

Icube Corp.

Robert Donald Hemming

Donald Robert Pannell

Modules of a network switch receive data transmissions from network stations via its I/O ports, each data transmission including an address of a source network station sending the transmission and an address of a destination station to receive the transmission. Each module receiving a data transmission either passes it on to a next module of the network switch via a ring bus or forwards it to the destination station when it is accessible via one of the module's own I/O ports. Each module includes an address translation unit mapping the network address of each station to the particular I/O port though which that network station communicates. The address translation unit updates its address-to-port mapping when a data transmission arrives at an I/O port from a source station having an unmapped or incorrectly mapped address, and then sends a mapping instruction to address translation units of all other switch modules via the ring bus telling them to similarly update their network address mappings.

Modular network switch with peer-to-peer address mapping communication

A network switch routes data transmissions between network stations, each data transmission including network addresses of the source and destination network stations. The network switch includes a set of input/output (I/O) ports each for receiving data transmissions from and transmitting data transmissions to a subset of the network stations. Each I/O port is identified by a &ldquo;physical&rdquo; port ID and a &ldquo;logical&rdquo; port ID. While each I/O port's physical port ID is unique, all I/O ports that can route data to the same subset of network stations share the same logical port ID. Each I/O port receiving a data transmission from a network station sends its logical port ID and the network addresses included in the data transmission to an address translation system. The address translation system uses data in the translation request to maintain a lookup table relating each subset of network addresses to a logical port ID identifying all I/O ports that communicate with network stations identified by that subset of network address. The address translation system responds to an address translation request by returning the logical port ID of all I/O ports that can send data transmissions to a destination station identified by the destination address included in the data transmission. In response to the returned logical port ID, the network switch establishes a data path for the data transmission from the I/O port receiving the data transmission and any idle I/O port having that logical port ID.

Growing community of inventors

Ben Lomond, CA, United States of America

Robert Donald Hemming