Experimental demonstration of a 64-port wavelength routing thin-CLOS system for data center switching architectures

This paper reports on the results of the design, fabrication, and experimental demonstration of a wavelength routing Thin-CLOS system based on arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) for intra-data-center applications. By using M² W-port AWGRs, this architecture allows increasing by a factor of M the scalability provided by a wavelength router using a single W-port AWGR. The fabricated Thin-CLOS system has 64 ports and makes use of M² = 4 AWGRs with W = 32 ports and 100 GHz channel spacing. The system fits in a 1U rack enclosure and consumes less than 10 W. We demonstrated error-free performance at 10 Gb∕s per wavelength with a power penalty of <3 dB under a worst-case crosstalk scenario. The adopted 64-port Thin-CLOS architecture makes use of four 32-port silica AWGRs to reduce the impact of in-band crosstalk while guaranteeing nonblocking connectivity among the 64 ports and using only W = 32 distinct wavelengths.