Over the past few years, many high performance asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches have been proposed. The majority of these switches have high performance but also high hardware complexity. Therefore, there is a need for switch designs with low complexity and high performance. This research proposes three new ATM switches based on the folded hypercube network (FHC). The performance of the three architectures are studied using a network model and simulation. The major performance parameters measured are the cell loss rate and cell delay time through the switch under uniform, normal, and bursty traffic patterns. To guarantee faster switching of time-sensitive cells, the routing algorithm of the three switches uses a priority scheme that gives higher precedence to the time-sensitive cells. Also, an output buffer controller is designed to manage the buffers in a fair manner. The three proposed switch architectures have lower complexity while providing equivalent or better switching performance compared to other more complex ATM switches described in the literature. This research shows a new approach to designing ATM switches by using the FHC as the switching fabric for the first time instead of using the crossbar, multi-path, or Banyan-based switching fabrics. / Ph. D.