Abstract

A novel optical free-space mesh-connected bus (MCB) interconnect network architecture is proposed. A MCB (Wittie, 1981) is known to have the capability of interconnecting, by using a three-stage switching, N nodes with a power distribution loss (PDL) proportional to $\sqrt{\text{N}}$, and is therefore advantageous for networking a large number, say, over 1000, of communicating ports. Based on conventional space-invariant optical components in a compact and efficient geometry, the proposed optical MCB system concept can be used to build either free space optical interconnect links for parallel processing applications or central switching systems for local or global light wave communication networks. By using the WDMA concept, various optical system implementation and performance issues, such as dispersion and aberration-limited interconnect capacity, power, and volume consumption efficiency, are discussed and parameters are analyzed. It was found that by using a reasonably compact three-dimensional free-space volume, more than 100,000 dispersion limited communication nodes at a uniform channel spacing of 0.75 nm can be linked with a moderate PDL of 28 dB. Some preliminary optical WDMA MCB experiments based on a 27 × 27 panchromatic optical source array were per formed to confirm the operational principle of the proposed concept.

© 1992 Optical Society of America