a switching fabric for a high - speed , high - performance digital traffic switch guarantees a high degree of resource availability and is resource efficient . each input port associated with the switching fabric is assigned a time slot in a repetitive time cycle . data cells received on input ports are staggered so that they are transmitted through the switching fabric in conformance with the assigned time slots . the time slot arrangement allows small data units associated with a particular cell , as they are forwarded through the switching fabric , to be converted into larger parallel data units which respect cell boundaries . the time slot arrangement further allows several of such larger data units to be written into an output queue in a single clock cycle . thus , cell contention is avoided while making efficient use of queue space . cells destined for multiple output ports associated with the switching fabric are written into the fullest output queue associated with one of the destination ports , so that the cell can be read and transmitted to all destination output ports using pointers , without the need to replicate the cell .