Optoelectronic Memory Array For Switching And Interconnection Networks

Photonic switching promises to be the backbone of ultrafast data communication; networks owing to its superior speed and bandwidth capabilities in handling vast amounts of data streams. A wide, range of designs on switching fabrics of such networks by using temporal, spatial and spectral bandwidths have been demonstrated. Most pholonic sw' Atching networks perform fast routing but provide little or no buffering for the incoming data. Data buffering is important because incoming data streams can exceed the network capacity for switching, or when more than one input port wants to send packets to the same output port resulting in network contention. When the switch bandwidth is less than the aggregate input bandwidths, data may be lost if they am not properly buffeied at the switching nodes. Thus, data buffering provides data-rate matching between systems with different speeds, and is of vital importance in the design of switching fabrics. However, not much attention has been paid to data buffering or interface design at the switching nodes of ft network.