Architecture to Integrate a Large-Scale DOPC-Based Optical Switching System on a Chip

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a four-level architecture to integrate an entire N × M × K optical switching system on a chip using wavelength selective optical switches based on digital optical phase conjugation (DOPC), where N is the number of input fibers, M the number of output fibers and K the number of wavelengths carried within each input and output fiber. We show that a strictly non-blocking 128 × 128 × 48 system might be built on a 131 mm × 67 mm chip. With a 0.8 nm channel space, such optical switching systems might be widely used for dense wavelength division multiplexing networks.