The Multipath Enhanced Transit Router Organization (metro) is a exible routing architecture for high-performance, tightly-coupled, multiprocessors and routing hubs. A metro router is a dilated c r ossbar routing component supporting half-duplex bidirectional, pipelined, circuit-switched c onnections. Each metro router is self-routing and supports dynamic message tra c. The routers works in conjunction with source-responsible network interfaces to achieve reliable end-to-end data transmission in

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... the presence o f heavy network congestion and dynamic faults. metro separates the fundamental architectural characteristics from implementation parameters. Simplicity of routing function coupled with freedom in the implementation parameters allows metro implementations to fully exploit available technology to achieve low-latency and high-bandwidth. We illustrate the e ects of this implementation freedom by summarizing the performance which various metro con gurations can extract from some modern CMOS technologies. Included in our illustrations is metrojr-orbit, a minimal instance of the metro architecture w e c onstructed i n a 1:2 gate-array technology. Acknowledgments: