Abstract

Mirrors have been widely used in designs of large astronomical telescopes, mainly because of the following two advantages: (1) they provide a near dispersion-free transfer function and (2) they can be manufactured in much larger sizes than can glass lenses. Despite these advantages, mirror-based optical systems have not been recognized for their potentials in optical signal processing and data communications. Recent fiber communications research has shown that an efficient way of utilizing the existing fiber bandwidth while alleviating the bandwidth burden on the interfacing electronics is to use the wavelength division multiple-access (WDMA) scheme. The WDMA concept may also be applied to the parallel processing applications where communicating nodes are densely packed. To reduce the material dispersion-related signal cross talk in a WDMA-based parallel processing environment, it is desirable to use dispersionless optical networks based on mirror-type hardware. In this talk, a novel optical dispersionless cross-over bus network for the WDMA environment is presented. By using a three-stage routing algorithm, more than 100,000 densely packed WDMA communication nodes can be interconnected. System parameters, such as diffraction- and aberration-limited interconnect capacity, power distribution loss, etc., are discussed. The system is compared to various other optical networks in terms of power efficiency, space requirements, and hardware complexity.

© 1992 Optical Society of America