The use of optical processing to perform switch-routing functions in photonic packet-switching networks prevents electronic data-flow bottlenecks and permits real-time routing of packets at very high speed. The architecture of a 2 X 2 photonic packet-switching node with optical packet generation, optical packet synchronization, optically-processed routing control, contention resolution (using deflection routing), and optical packet demultiplexing is presented. Terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexers (TOADs), which allow ultrafast optical demultiplexing for terabit per second pulses with less than one picojoule switching energy, are utilized in the switch architecture. A two-channel optical demultiplexing experiment using the TOAD is reported, where two 2 ps, 100 Mbit/s pulse trains are extracted successfully from two time-multiplexed channels with a channel spacing of 40 ps.

Date Published: 1 November 1993
PDF: 21 pages
Proc. SPIE 2024, Multigigabit Fiber Communication Systems, (1 November 1993); doi: 10.1117/12.161320

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2024:
Multigigabit Fiber Communication Systems
Leonid G. Kazovsky; Karen Liu, Editor(s)