Abstract

As optical transmission systems continue to grow in both speed and utilization, the need for higher throughput cross-connect systems will increase. With the number of optical terminations in central offices increasing, optical level bandwidth management and restoration applications will become more important. Space division guided-wave optical switching technology can meet these needs^{[1] [2]}. Toward that goal here we report for the first time on a fully implemented dilated, strictly non-blocking 16×16 photonic switch system based on a novel architecture, that offers the potential of bit-rate and wavelength transparency. The switch system utilizes 23 fully interconnected lithium niobate switching modules assembled into a modular physical design bay structure (Figure 1), with full dedicated electronic and computer control of all switching elements. Consistent with the use of erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA’s) for loss compensation, the switch was designed to operate at 1.5µm. The system exhibits good loss and crosstalk performance as reported in this paper.

© 1993 Optical Society of America