3Com CoreBuilder 7000 Management Manual page 27

CoreBuilder 7000 Family of ATM Switches 27
Switching Engine
With its 2.5 Gbps switching engine, it has all the performance needed for
moving traditional switched LAN technologies to ATM. Supporting up to
16 OC-3 155 Mbps ATM ports, up to 144 switched Ethernet ports, or up
to 64 Fast Ethernet ports per chassis, the CoreBuilder 7000 family ATM
switch is well-suited for networks requiring an ATM/Ethernet switch
capable of multiple deployment options. In addition, there is 50%
improvement in signaling performance since version 4.0 was released.
The powerful 16x16 ATM switching engine employs a cut-through,
non-blocking, self-routing architecture that can handle up to 2.56 Gbps
of traffic and supports up to 4096 virtual channels per port. This
high-speed architecture makes it possible to support 16 full-rate links –
both Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint. The switch's 20.48 Gbps
passive backplane enables future expansion to faster switch engines, high
port-density interface cards and higher speed ports.
The CoreBuilder 7000 family ATM switch greatly increases the aggregate
bandwidth of a backbone or workgroup. This is accomplished using 155
Mbps OC-3c SONET/SDH interfaces to collapsed backbone devices, such
as intelligent switching hubs or high-performance, multiprotocol
bridge/routers, as well as to other CoreBuilder 7000 family ATM switches,
to form the campus ATM backbone.