Abstract

Currently there is a strong effort towards the development of optical network layers that can handle large amounts of traffic. They employ add/drop and cross connect units that hopefully can be implemented without the need for optoelectronic translations and thereby avoiding the speed limitations of electronics. Instead all-optical functionalities such as space switching, wavelength conversion, time demultiplexing, clock recovery and simple pattern recognition are needed depending on the type of system.

© 1996 Optical Society of America