Abstract

Once ‛photonic switching’ has been demonstrated, the performance has been taken over by electronics in a past decade, like the competition between GaAs and Si in the microelectronics technologies. Recently, bit greedy telecommunication services like Multimedia are coming up and multi-wavelength networking, in which multi-wavelength will be used for new functions, not for a simple idea of increasing channel capacity, is revealing a new horizon to ‛photonic switching’. We will discuss how to share each role of photonics and electronics in the emerging field.

© 1995 Optical Society of America