Abstract

The exchange of informations at high data rates between optoelectronic transducers is an important task encountered in all advanced architectures of high capacity parallel optical processors and optical transmission links. For these purposes, the use of all-optical techniques for large scale and very broad-band switching is currently the object of active researchs. For a limited number of input-ouput signals, integrated optical technologies using ligth propagation in electro-optic waveguides offer attractive performances. However, for the much larger switching capacities which will be required in the future, for example 1024 x 1024, the most attractive switch architecture should exploit the 2-D parallel space transmission of the optical beams (1-3). Because of the high degree of parallelism of this approach a switching time constant of few milliseconds would be convenient. The potentiel capabilities of such a switching technique are therefore very large, in particular if the connection between any light emitter and receiver can be reconfigured in real-time. The aim of the lecture is to show that the principle of reconfigurable interconnections can be demonstrated on the basis of wave mixing experiments with photorefractive crystals. The operating mode, of a 2-D optical switch is schematically shown in Figure 1. The point to point connection is established through the angular deflection of the beams emerging from the 2-D input light emitter array (semiconductor lasers, single mode fibers...).

© 1987 Optical Society of America