World’s Largest Nanosecond Speed Optical Switch

Next generation Internet needs core switches and routers to have >100Tb/s capacity. Past nanosecond speed optical switches do not have good port-count scalability. Professor Cheng Tee Hiang from the NTU School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering and collaborators from the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research then devised a novel optical switch architecture based on a parallel array of arrayed waveguide grating (AWGRs) routers, and experimentally demonstrated a 448 x 448 optical switch with capacity of 448 x 40 Gb/s (only 448 instead of 512 ports are demonstrated due to equipment limitations). This is the largest nanosecond speed optical switch ever been demonstrated worldwide. This invention can be used to implement core switches, routers and optical cross-connects with switching capacity in excess of 100Tb/s. An invention disclosure has been made to Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR).

A 512 x 512 optical switch based on the proposed architecture

72 ns switching time achieved in the experiment​