Assessment of Scalable and Fast 1310-nm Optical Switch for High-Capacity Data Center Networks

The development of high-capacity 1310-nm optical interconnects and the limitation of the electrical switches have necessitated the investigation of 1310-nm optical switches for flat data center networks. We have performed an experimental assessment of the scalable and fast 1310-nm optical switching system with three types of traffic, namely, the waveband 4×25 Gb/s ON-OFF keying (OOK), 28 Gb/s 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4), and 40 Gb/s discrete multi-tone (DMT) by using the prototyped 1310-nm optical switch. 10-dB input power dynamic range has been achieved at 16 ports for waveband 4×25 Gb/s, 28-Gb/s PAM4, and 40-Gb/s DMT with power penalty of 1, 3, and 3.3 dB, respectively. Waveband 4×25Gb/s OOK traffic shows the most promising results with port-count scaling up to 64 ports with limited penalty and allows for the potential scaling to larger port-count and more wavelength channels.