Abstract

Many ongoing efforts to implement large-size, multi-gigabit ATM switches have been motivated by the fact that Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is becoming a standard for B-ISDN applications. The different approaches incorporate both electronic and photonic designs. We continue to investigate photonic designs in this area which are cost-effective compared to electronic designs and are feasible with present photonic technology. Our design goal is to implement a large ATM switch (in excess of 256 lines) with a data rate of 2.5 Gb/s per line. We concentrate on photonic implementations which use star-coupler based, WDM techniques. In this presentation we propose an architecture which, by incorporating the best features of some of the previous designs, offers the best possible switching performance in terms of delay-throughput characteristics but requires the smallest number of wavelengths and a simple control mechanism, independent of the switch size.

© 1993 Optical Society of America