Optical switch

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

Micromachined free-space integrated micro-optics

Abstract: The surface-micromachining technique has been employed to fabricate novel three-dimensional micro-optical elements for free-space integrated optics. The optical axes of these optical elements are parallel to the substrate, which enables the entire free-space optical system to be integrated on a single substrate. Microscale Fresnel lenses, mirrors, beam splitters, gratings, and precision optical mounts have been successfully fabricated and characterized. In addition, micropositioners such as rotary stages and linear translational stages are monolithically integrated with the optical components using the same surface-micromachining process to provide on-chip optical alignment or optomechanical switching. Self-aligned hybrid integration with semiconductor edge-emitting lasers and vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers are also demonstrated for the first time. This new free-space micro-optical bench (FSMOB) technology could significantly reduce the size, weight, and cost of most optical systems, and could have a significant impact on optical switching, optical sensing and optical data-storage systems as well as on the packaging of optoelectronic components.

Low-Loss Integrated Photonic Switch Using Subwavelength Patterned Phase Change Material

Abstract: Efficient integrated photonic switches play a critical role in both interchip optical interconnects and data center networks that need to be dynamically reconfigured. Here, we demonstrate a 1 × 2 s...

Load balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switches

Abstract: Motivated by the need of a simple and high performance switch architecture that scales up with the speed of fiber optics, we propose a switch architecture with two-stage switching fabrics and one-stage buffering. The first stage performs load balancing, while the second stage is a Birkhoff-von Neumann input-buffered switch that performs switching for load balanced traffic. Such a switch is called the load balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switch in this paper. The on-line complexity of the switch is O(1). It is shown that under a mild technical condition on the input traffic, the load balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switch achieves 100% throughput as an output-buffered switch for both unicast and multicast traffic with fan-out splitting. When input traffic is bursty, we show that load balancing is very effective in reducing delay, and the average delay of the load balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switch converges to that of an output-buffered switch under heavy load. Also, by simulations, we demonstrate that load balancing is more effective than the conflict resolution algorithm, i-SLIP, in heavy loads. When both the load balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switch and the corresponding output-buffered switch are allocated with the same finite amount of buffer at each port, we also show that the packet loss probability in the load balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switch is much smaller than that in an output-buffered switch when the buffer is large.

Integrated optoelectronic device, and integrated circuit device

Abstract: An integrated optoelectronic device includes an electric circuit unit, such as a bare chip of integrated electronic devices, and an optical device unit for performing at least a portion of the input and output of signals to and from the electronic circuit unit via optical signals. The electronic circuit unit and the optical device unit are packaged in a common package with contoured upper, lower and side surfaces, and the optical device unit is provided on a side surface of the package.

Optical traffic grooming in OFDM-based elastic optical networks [Invited]

Abstract: Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier modulation technology that transmits a high-speed data stream using multiple spectrally overlapped lower-speed subcarriers. Optical OFDM (O-OFDM) technology is a promising candidate for future high-speed optical transmission. Based on O-OFDM, a novel elastic optical network architecture with immense flexibility and scalability in spectrum allocation and data rate accommodation can be built to support diverse services and the rapid growth of Internet traffic. This architecture can provide various services directly at the optical layer in a spectrum-efficient way through bandwidth-elastic optical paths. However, carrying various data rate services using a single type of bandwidth-variable transponder might not be cost-efficient. Electrical traffic grooming is a traditional approach for sub-wavelength service accommodation in wavelength division multiplexing networks. However, it places additional electrical switching and optical-electrical-optical conversion requirements on the network, which may lead to higher cost and energy consumption. In contrast, grooming traffic optically is an attractive option for elastic optical networks. In this paper, we propose a novel optical grooming approach to aggregate and distribute traffic directly at the optical layer in OFDM-based elastic optical networks. We study routing and spectrum allocation algorithms of optical grooming to show the benefits of this approach. Our results demonstrate that significant transmitter and spectrum savings can be achieved by the optical grooming versus the non-grooming scenario, and a trade-off between optimizing the number of transmitters and optimizing spectrum usage should be considered during network planning.