An ATM LAN Access Switch (ALAX) based on IEEE P1355 is being designed at the Laboratory for Advanced Switching Technologies (LAST) as a collaborative project by a research team which consists of the Protocol Engineering Center (PEC) of Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of Korea, Institute for Systems Research (ISR) of the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) and Modacom Co., Ltd. of Korea. The main function of the ALAX is to provide interfaces among different legacy communication networks and the ATM world. The design objective of the ALAX system is to achieve an excellent performance/cost ratio while simplifying the overall process of systems engineering, rather than to achieve the highest possible speeds. In this paper, some of the architectural issues involved in the ALAX design are discussed.