In future broadband communication networks the interest for purely pho
tonic switches is due to the bandwidth mismatch between optical transm
ission networks and electronic switching nodes, Photonic ATM switching
fabrics mainly based on wavelength-switching stages are therefore bei
ng studied, to implement high capacity switches with also concentratio
n, multiplexing and demultiplexing functions, using state-of-the-art p
hotonic technology, The architecture of an ATM photonic access concent
rator is described in this paper, illustrating the design and implemen
tation of its basic subsystems, the traffic concentrator and the cell
multiplexer, The design guidelines are outlined in detail referring to
an example, where 128 user lines at 622 Mb/s are given access to 4 ou
tlets at 2.488 Gb/s, The corresponding implementation, based on the sy
stematic use of cell wavelength encoding, makes use either of well/kno
wn photonic components, such as Fabry-Perot filters, fiber delay lines
, splitters and combiners, either of recently developed de,ices, like
high-speed optical gates and tunable filters and lasers, Finally, the
system feasibility is demonstrated presenting the results obtained on
a reduced size and speed experimental setup of the cell multiplexer.