Abstract

Next generation packet switch fabrics operating with data rates up to and exceeding 10 Gb/s are likely to benefit optical routing and gating applications by avoiding contention and electrical crosstalk, and alleviating the bandwidth requirements of electronic interconnects. A series of optical crosspoint architectures have been devised operating both in the millisecond and nanosecond switching regimes. In terms of the nanosecond regime, which is particularly suitable for packet routing purposes, electro-optic, electro-absorptive and amplifying switches have been considered. Amplifying gates^1,2 remain attractive as a low cost solution as they are compact monolithic components which allow the possibility of net gain. Care must however be take to ensure noise and distortion induced penalties do not limit functionality. Advances in amplifier design have led to a highly linear semiconductor amplifier with significantly higher distortion thresholds,^3,4 and so it is of interest to understand the trade off between amplifier linearisation and gate performance in anticipated packet switched networks. In particular to date, little work has concerned the use of gain-clamped SOAs in cross-point optical switches. This work therefore studies the potential for gain clamped SOA gates in crosspoints and shows that greatly enhanced performance can be achieved in applications where cascading of switches is required.

© 2002 Optical Society of America