In the paper, a high speed magneto-optic switch based on the Faraday Effect is designed and analyzed. The novel magneto-optic switch presented in this paper will satisfy high speed transmission and exchange of optical-message through all-optic network. It consists of three important components as followed novel optical route, Faraday rotator configuration with ultrafast magnetic field and picosecond impulser. It may switch the optical route by controlling Faraday rotator which is supplied by picosecond impulser. By the development of the magneto-optic crystal, and ultrafast magnetic field, the designed magneto-optic switch featured as low insertion loss, low crosstalk, high switching speed and small bulky size gets ahead of traditional optic switches. As the first part of this paper, a design scheme of optical route in high speed magneto-optic switch and its experiment analysis will be discussed. Good avalanche effect of transistor FMMT415 is adopted to generate picosecond pulse signal and then to drive the high speed magnetic field. Shown by the experiment data, the rising time of the impulse about 1ns, the amplitude of the impulse about 100~500V are available on the Output end from the picosecond impulser, which can be used as driving current pulse of Faraday rotator. By using the relationship between the polarization plane rotate direction of polarization light and magnetic direction, the Faraday rotator is designed.

Date Published: 11 November 2008
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 7134, Passive Components and Fiber-based Devices V, 71341Z (11 November 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.803326

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7134:
Passive Components and Fiber-based Devices V
Ming-Jun Li; Ping Shum; Ian H. White; Xingkun Wu, Editor(s)