A switching fabric is the combination of hardware and software that moves data coming in to a network node out by the correct port (door) to the next node in the network. A switching fabric includes the switching units in a node, the integrated circuits that they contain, and the programming that allows switching paths to be controlled. The switching fabric is independent of the bus technology and infrastructure used to move data between nodes and also separate from the router.
A shared bus is usually composed of master interfaces, slave interfaces, arbiters and a shared backplane. The peripheral endpoints are connected to the shared backplane through master and slave interfaces. The access to the backplane is arbitrated through the arbiters. The master interface initiates the bus transfer, and the device addressed by the transfer is considered as the slave.
