An ultra-low latency routing node for optical packet interconnection networks

The design of low latency optical interconnect switching node has been confirmed. Six of such nodes have been successfully fabricated on a single 6" /spl times/ 19" PCB and have been arranged into a switching fabric subsystem. The latency of each node is 16.4 ns and the required deadtime is 2.0 ns, and because the node itself is payload-transparent, there is almost no limit to the bandwidth of the packets which it can route. Further design improvements will reduce the latency and improve address processing functionality.