Waveguide optical switch for 8:1 standby system of optical line terminals

Summary form only given. Summary form only given. To reduce the cost of the optical access network without sacrificing system reliability, instead of using a fully duplex standby system, we are planning to allow a single reserve to be shared among several pieces of equipment. We show the planned configuration of a standby system to share a reserved optical subscriber unit (OSU) in an optical line terminal (OLT) for NTT's passive double star (PDS) optical access network. This solution, however, requires an optical switch to have high reliability and low insertion loss and be independent of both wavelength and polarization, inexpensive and self-latching. None of the switches proposed so far meet all these requirements. In this paper we propose an 8:1 optical switch that is suitable for sharing a reserve OSU to reduce the standby cost. Our switch is an intersecting waveguide switch, whose operating principle is based on thermo-capillarity.