o look at information as deserialized and properly aligned words. The backplane is structurally and electrically a key component of the overall switch fabric. As a result, it is usually of proprietary design and com- pletely incompatible with other vendors' switch fabric chips. Despite this fact, they all essentially share a similar layout, which is physically limited to about 1,000 printed circuit board (PCB) traces given the very high speeds it must meet without signal reflection and interference. They are also manufac- tured most often out of the same so-called FR4 material that is used for advanced performance PCBs. Backplane operation can be either synchronous, which means a central clock signal must be dis- tributed along with data signals, or asynchronous, which requires very precise (typically to 100 parts- per-million levels of precision) clock generation on all system cards. In asynchronous operations, to make up for the potential data drifts that will inevitably occur due to the statistical lack of syn- chronicity between the multiple clock domains, the switch fabric will periodically inject an idle cycle in order to reset the local clock phase, which otherwise will disallow the decoding of the so-called 8b/10b-encoded data and inhibit operation. Buffering is typically foreseen in the backplane interface design next to the serdes transceivers. This ensures that data undergo a series of well-calculated delay stages whenever crossing into new clock domains. In fact, this first-in first-out (FIFO) path allows the deskewing of bits and the consequent alignment of frames. The fabric control CPU keeps track of many of these parameters and intervenes accordingly in the fine-tuning of the configuration at ini- tialization time besides handling typical transmission-related issues such as error correction, cyclic redundancy coding, and SO on. The majority of switch fabric manufacturers provide high-speed serial links from line cards to their switch fabric chipset through their backplane. These links can be desig