The research article presents the hardware chip design and FPGA implementation of the four-stage telecommunication switching system. The switching capacity of the exchange is increased with the implementation of the programmable multistage network. In multistage network, there are alternate paths to provide the availability of the network. The four-stage switching provides more capacity in comparison to three-stage switching. Modular design approach is used to build the large-scale network, which can be fabricated easily using VLSI technology. The design is carried for 8 × 8 switching network. The work is carried out in Xilinx ISE 14.2 software using VHDL programming language and synthesized on Vitex-5 FPGA. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017.