Abstract

A recently proposed 3-D optical Fredkin gate interconnection network¹ is further analyzed. It is shown that any arbitrary permutation of an array of N × N channels can be performed by cascading 3N – 1 switching layers. The complexity of this architecture, which is defined as the total number of switching elements, is determined and compared with a similar parameter for the 2-D architecture. It is shown that the 3-D architecture becomes superior to the 2-D architecture as the number of channels N_c increases. In particular, the 3-D architecture is found very suitable for the cases where N_c is a square number.

© 1989 Optical Society of America