PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION OF A REFRACTIVE OPTICAL BEAM DEFLECTOR AND ITSPROPERTIES AS A PHOTONIC SWITCH

An optomechanical photonic switch that exploits the stationary propert y of the minimum deviation angle of a dispersive prism is described. T he switch is based on an optical beam deflector consisting of an elect ric motor with hollow shaft. The tip of the motor is fitted with a dis persive prism and the deflected beam is focused onto pixels arranged a round a circular scan track. It is shown that the proposed switch is, for all practical purposes, completely insensitive to mechanical wobbl e of the motor. Furthermore, the existing technology suggests that suc h a small-inertia motor with no external load may achieve speeds up to hundreds of thousands of revolutions per minute and beyond. We sugges t one application of the switch as a write gate of a time slot interch anger in the time-division switching of pulse code modulation (PCM) co des. It is shown that the proposed switch can achieve speeds up to and exceeding hundreds of megabits per second.