Proposed Low-Power High-Speed Microring Resonator-Based Switching Technique for Dynamically Reconfigurable Optical Interconnects

Abstract

The dynamic bandwidth re-allocation (DBR) technique balances traffic by re-allocating bandwidth from under-utilized links to over-utilized links in a network. In this letter, we propose a nonblocking, fast, low-power, and integratable optical switch that enables DBR. The basic building blocks of the proposed switch are silicon-on-insulator-based microring resonators. Analytical and numerical studies show that the active switch design gives similar performance in throughput and latency, while reducing cost (number of lasers) and area significantly when compared to implementation of DBR with only passive components. There is a slight increase in power (~0.4% for worst-case traffic pattern) using the active switch implementation.