Design and verification of large-scale optical circuit switch using ULCF AWGs for datacenter application

The exponential increase in the volume of traffic being processed by datacenters demands massive electrical switches and complicated interconnections. The power consumption will soon become critical, and the problem is expected to be resolved by introducing large-port-count optical circuit switches that connect many server racks or pods. In this paper, we propose a novel optical-circuit-switch architecture that uses n × N uniformloss and cyclic-frequency (ULCF) arrayed-waveguide gratings (AWGs) as low-loss wavelength routers. To confirm the effectiveness of our proposal, a pair of 12 × 48 ULCF AWGs is fabricated using planar-lightwave-circuit technology. Part of a 1536 × 1536 optical circuit switch is constructed, and its good transmission performance is experimentally confirmed through 96-wavelength 100-Gbps signal transmission in the full C-band. The switch throughput reaches 153.6 Tbps.