PHOTONIC ATM SWITCH USING VERTICAL-TO-SURFACE TRANSMISSION ELECTROPHOTONIC DEVICES (VSTEPS)

This paper proposes a new architecture of photonic ATM switch to event ually realize beyond Tbps throughput ATM operation in the nationwide B -ISDN. The proposed architecture is based on Vertical to Surface Trans mission Electro-Photonic devices (VSTEPs), which can be used both as a n optical buffer memory and as an optical self-routing circuit. Since VSTEP is an integrated two-dimensional array, the VSTEP based optical buffer memory using massively parallel optical interconnections, based on the free-space optical beam propagation, is an effective solution to achieve ultrahigh throughput in the buffer. The optical cell signal speed in the proposed optical buffer memory can reach around 10 Gbps. By using the VSTEP's function as the optical header-driven gates in a two-dimensional array, the high-speed and large capacity optical self -routing circuit can be fabricated without being limited by the electr ic control circuit operation. In the optical self-routing circuit, con tention resolution to prevent collision among cell signals, can be eas ily achieved. The numbers of possible input and output port in the sel f-routing circuit are estimated to be around 100. Experiments on opera tions of both the optical buffer memory and the optical self-routing c ircuit with contention resolution are successfully carried out. Finall y, it is shown that the three-dimensional implementation using free-sp ace optical interconnections is effective to construct high throughput optical self-routing circuit with small hardware amount.