Abstract

With the trends towards provision of broadband services, there will be an increasing requirement for high throughput and capacity in switch fabrics. Capacity gains can be achieved through exploiting the spectral bandwidth of optical switches. Additionally, the time and space domain can be exploited to give multidimensional switching^[1]. Applications for such flexible switching lie in signal processing or fast-switching within the telecommunications network. Recently, interest has been growing in packet-based systems such as ATM. These systems require the header content of the cells to be interpreted, and used to route the cells. The control functions of such systems are best implemented using electronics, but optical switching can provide a high capacity and flexible interconnection medium.

© 1993 Optical Society of America