Some Novel Photonic Guided-Wave Space-Switching Architectures

Abstract

We propose a new family of architectures for photonic switching—the S Spiral. Analytical expressions are given for the various factors and constraints that arise in the implementation of such optical switching architectures eg, differential insertion loss, signal to crosstalk ratio, substrate real-estate utilization, number of waveguide crossovers and the non-blocking characteristics. We estimate the upper bound on the order of the architecture and level of integration. It is shown that the SSpiral family have a high degree of fault tolerance, using the Normalized Fault Tolerance as a figure of merit. A heuristic distributed routing algorithm in O(n) time is suggested.

Indexing terms:

• Optical switching architecture
• Multistage interconnection networks