Gigabit Network Testbeds With Semiconductor Optical Amplifier Based Optical Crossbar Switches

Optivision has recently designed and built several high performance optical crossbar switches. These switches are complete turnkey systems and represent an important step forward for photonic switching from the laboratory to demonstration testbeds. The goal of the work presented here is to apply Opti vision's optical switching expertise to create a scalable, high bandwidth, all-optical switched network for interconnecting high performance computers, workstations and peripherals. Two 8x8 optical crossbar switches have been deployed to form two separate single-switch testbeds. One testbed supports gigabit/sec computer networking experiments. The other testbed is exploring the transport of mixed analog and digital data within a common network. In both testbeds the information is transported in optical form with electro-optic conversion performed only at the end points of the networks.