ARCHITECTURE FOR LARGE DILATED OPTICAL TDM SWITCHING-NETWORKS

A novel architecture for optical TDM switching is introduced, comprisi ng 2 x 2 optical switches integrated onto large substrates, and fibre delay lines. The performance of the architecture is characterised in t erms of switch count, crosstalk, frame delay, attenuation and control complexity. It is shown that in the near future a system with 16 input s and outputs, handling a total of 4096 TDM channels, could be demonst rated experimentally with 448 switches on six substrates using state-o f-the-art technology.