DEMONSTRATION FOR AN OPTOELECTRONIC SWITCHING NETWORK

The concept for building a multistage switching network with optoelect ronic components for several hundred parallel channels is investigated . The key components for an experiment are: laser arrays, microlens ar rays, holographic optical permutation elements and a monolithic optoel ectronic application specific integrated circuit with integrated photo detectors and electronic logic for switching. The demonstration presen ted in this contribution is a non-blocking and selfrouting shuffle exc hange network implementing Batcher's sorting algorithm. It consists of three cascaded stages each having four parallel channels running at a clock rate of 1 MBit s -1. Scaling towards larger number of channels and higher overall data throughput is considered.