Crossbar Switch Fabrics

Crossbar Switch Fabrics

Crossbar switch fabrics on the Catalyst 6500 are enabled via the SFM version I or II, or the Supervisor 720.

With the Catalyst 6509, for example, the SFM provides a 16-Gbps (32-Gbps full duplex) connection to each line card. As mentioned previously in the "Supervisors and Switch Fabrics" section, the SFMII is required to support the Catalyst 6513 but because of the number of slots (13), only 8 Gbps is delivered to the first 7 usable slots, and 16 Gbps is provided to the last 5 slots.

Figure 3-8 illustrates the connections from the switch fabric to each module on a Catalyst 6509 switch.

The crossbar switch fabric creates multiple high-speed simultaneous connections between modules.