Have you heard of The Large Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) - it operates a high energy collider 100m under the Swiss and French border near Geneva to explore the boundaries of high energy physics - matched by no other facility in the world.
The monitoring system referred to as OASIS (Open Analogue Signal Information System) uses a set of digitizers to acquire the signals and this is relayed out to users over an Ethernet system, but the digitizers are expensive and there cannot be one digitizer for every monitor signal. A switching system is used to allow OASIS to select which signals to show from the variety of signals available, and that switching system has historically been based on VXI and more recently cPCI solutions, but that is changing.
Designing a New OASIS Switch
CERN approached Pickering Interfaces for ideas on a new switching system to be deployed during the scheduled upgrade. The basic requirement was for a matrix with 10’s of MHz of BW
and a size of up to 104x16. Discussions made it apparent that crosstalk would be a major concern in any implementation, and 
the sheer size of the matrix required made it hard to use traditional approaches to solve the problem, meet the performance objectives and meet the budget requirements.
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