Abstract: A method and apparatus which obviates the throughput limitations retries generated by busy conditions of conventional switches which are limited to but a single path between any two ports through the use of a “hunt group” concept whereby multiple paths can be provided between a participating group member and another port. These multiple paths may be associated in groups of, for example, eight, with each grouping of eight paths then comprising a “hunt group” whereby the first available member of the hunt group will be selected to enable the connection should the first be “busy”. The particular embodiment disclosed comprises a plurality of sequentially organized hunt groups starting on a boundary of eight associated with ports 0-7, 8-15, . . . through 248-255.

Abstract: A high bandwidth central memory controller utilizing a pipelined TDM bus such that each serial interface can sustain a bandwidth of up to 100 MByte/second for both the transmission and reception of variable length frames. Each port is assigned a fixed number of queues, a TDM slot number and the address routing for all other queues associated with the remaining ports at initialization, such that when a frame is received, the appropriate queue is determined from the addressing in the frame header and the initialized route tables. When the port's TDM slot for a memory request is active, a request for the output queue is made to the central memory controller if an "output queue available" indication is returned and the frame data is placed on the bus during the input port's data TDM slot. If the output queue is not available, the input port may either discard the received data frame or generate a busy/reject frame to be placed on one of its own output queues during its TDM data slot.