A WDM Optical Backplane with AWG Based Passive Routing

An optical backplane based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is introduced. It is a tunable transmitter fixed receiver (TT-FR) architecture, which incorporates an NtimesN arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) element for passive data routing. A four-node prototype has been built using high-speed FPGAs for the implementation of the control plane. Bit-error-rate (BER) versus power incident on the receiver using three different AWGs has been measured at a data rate of 10 Gbps per link under static and dynamically changing configurations.