Optical switch

About: Optical switch is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 28538 publications have been published within this topic receiving 351176 citations.

A new waveguide switch/modulator for integrated optics

Abstract: A waveguide optical switch and/or modulator device is described that uses a single‐mode waveguide version of the Mach‐Zehnder interferometer. A mode selective branching waveguide is used for switching, and modulation can be accomplished without external polarizers in single‐mode waveguides. The operation of a 1×2 switch fabricated by diffusion techniques in ZnSe is described.

A Low-power Low-cost Optical Router for Optical Networks-on-Chip in Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip

Abstract: Networks-on-chip (NoCs) can improve the communication bandwidth and power efficiency of multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoC). However, traditional metallic interconnects consume significant amount of power to deliver even higher communication bandwidth required in the near future. Optical NoCs are based on optical interconnects and optical routers, and have significant bandwidth and power advantages. This paper proposed a high-performance low-power low-cost optical router, Cygnus, for optical NoCs. Cygnus is non-blocking and based on silicon microresonators. We compared Cygnus with other microresonator-based routers, and analyzed their power consumption, optical power insertion loss, and the number of microresonators used in detail. The results show that Cygnus has the lowest power consumption and losses, and requires the lowest number of microresonators. For example, Cygnus has 50% less power consumption, 51% less optical power insertion loss, and 20% less microresonators than the optimized traditional optical crossbar router. Comparing to a high-performance 45nm electronic router, Cygnus consumes 96% less power. Moreover, the passive routing feature of Cygnus guarantees that, while using dimension order routing algorithm, the maximum power consumption to route a packet through a network is a small constant number, regardless of the network size. For example, the maximum power consumption is 4.80fJ/bit under current technologies. We simulated and analyzed an 8x8 2D mesh NoC built from Cygnus and showed the end-to-end delay and network throughput under different offered loads and packet sizes.

Software defined optical networks technology and infrastructure: Enabling software-defined optical network operations

Abstract: A control plane architecture based on OpenFlow for optical SDN is introduced. Requirements for its implementation are discussed considering emerging optical transport technologies. Two implementations of the architecture and results on their performance are reported.

Low-Loss and Broadband Nonvolatile Phase-Change Directional Coupler Switches

Abstract: An optical equivalent of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is of great interest to large-scale photonic integrated circuits. Previous programmable photonic devices relying on the weak, volat...

Si Photonic Wire Waveguide Devices

Abstract: Si photonic wire waveguides are attractive for constructing various optical devices that are extremely small because the waveguides can be bent with extremely small curvatures of less than a few micrometers of bending radius. We have fabricated optical directional couplers with the waveguides and demonstrated their fundamental characteristics. Their coupling length was extremely short, several micrometers, because of strong optical coupling between the waveguide cores. We have also demonstrated wavelength-demultiplexing functions for these devices with a long coupled waveguide. Optical outputs from a device with a 100-mum-long coupled waveguide changed reciprocally with a 20-nm wavelength spacing between the parallel and cross ports. We also demonstrated the operation of ultrasmall optical add-drop multiplexers (OADMs) with Bragg grating reflectors made up of the waveguides. The dropping wavelength bandwidth of the OADMs was less than 0.7 nm, and these dropping wavelengths could be precisely designed by adjusting the grating period. Using the Si photonic wire waveguide, we have also demonstrated thermo-optic switches. Metal thin-film heaters were evaporated onto the branch of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer that incorporated the waveguide to achieve switching operations by thermo-optic effects. In these switching operations, we observed more than 30 dB of extinction ratio, less than 90 mW of switching power, and less than 100 mus of switching speed