An associative self-compacting buffer for communication switches

This paper describes a novel VLSI CMOS implementation of a self-compacting buffer (SCB) for the dynamically allocated multi-queue (DAMQ) switch architecture. The SCB scheme dynamically allocates data regions within the input buffer for each output channel. The proposed scheme provides a high-performance solution to buffered communication switches that are required in interconnection networks. This performance comes from the DAMQ approach as well as the Associative Channel Pointer implementation and novel circuitry. The major components of the SCB are described in detail in this paper. The system has the capability of performing a read, a write, or a simultaneous read/write operation per cycle