A parallel optical processor for control of optical crossbar switches - Optical Communication, 1988. (ECOC 88)., Fourteenth European Conference on (Conf. Publ. No.292)

N x N optical crossbar switches provide photonic switching networks with non-blocking programmable interconnections that have a channel bandwidth compatible with optical fibers. These switches have been realized in two basic forms: integrated-optic and free-space optical crossbars [l-21. Processing of information to set-up It is expected that optical interconnection networks will be required to dynamically route broad-band signals at rates in excess of 1 GHz, therefore electronic processing of routing algorithms may present a bottleneck [3]. Optical processing of these algorithms can be used to alleviate this bottleneck by increased throughput due to high channel bandwidth [4] and the parallelism of free space optical systems. switch crosspoints has traditionally been relegated to electronic processors.