MERGING ELECTRONICS AND PHOTONICS TOWARDS THE TERABIT S ATM SWITCHING/

The paper is focused on the architectural and technological solutions that will allow the transition from small to huge capacity ATM Switchi ng Systems. This path starts from the industrial nodes available today and will arrive at the photonic switching architecture. The progressi ve introduction of photonics has already started with the use of optic al interconnections in ATM nodes of hundreds of Gbit/s. A balanced use of microelectronics and photonics is the correct answer to the Terabi t/s switching system challenge. After presenting a modular ATM Switchi ng System, some technological solutions like Multichip Modules and Opt ical Interconnections are presented in order to explain how node capac ity can be expanded. Some results of the research activity on photonic Switching are finally shown in order to exploit the great attitude of this technique to obtain very high throughput nodes.