Abstract

Conventionally, the perfect shuffle interconnection stage and the switching stage in an optical Omega network are implemented by different methods. In this paper, a technique is proposed so that these two stages can be realized by the same optical setup. It utilizes the concept that the switching mechanism can also be realized by the duplicate, shift, superimpose and masking procedures as used in perfect shuffle interconnection.¹ This is illustrated as follows. Figure 1(a) shows the perfect shuffle interconnection. The interlaced input pattern is first duplicated into two copies. One of them is shifted downward by a fixed number of pixels and then superimposed with the unshifted one. The superimposed pattern is then masked by a window so as to extract the shuffled outputs. The switching mechanism can also be performed by the same procedures, as shown in Figure 1(b). The two inputs are first mirrorly duplicated in the input plane. Then two copies are produced. One of them is shifted downward by 3 pixels while the other remains unshifted. The superimposed pattern is then masked by a fixed-size window with controllable position. If the required operation is a bypass one, then the window should be in the upper position so as to extract the (1,2) outputs. On the other hand, the lower window selects the lower pair (2,1) and it corresponds to an exchange operation.

© 1995 IEEE