Abstract

Optical routing systems could provide high capacity, transparency, flexibility, and easy upgradability. Within this context, an optical cross-connect node architecture based on both space and wavelength switching has been proposed.¹ With their polarization insensitivity, large optical bandwidth, and ease of control owing to their digital response, InP digital optical switches (DOSs)^2,3 are good candidates for space switching. We report, for the first time to our knowledge, on a complete space-switching experiment of two 2.5-Gbit/s channels with a 4 × 1 DOS module. The insertion loss is 18 dB, the channel unfairness is 0.7 dB, the cross talk is lower than −25 dB, and the penalty is as low as 0.4 dB for a bit error rate (BER) of 10⁻⁹.

© 1995 Optical Society of America