Broadband photonic switching using guided-wave fabrics

Photonic switches based on guided-wave lithium niobate technology are considered, and one of the first applications, the distributed switching with centralized optics (DiSCO) experimental switching system, is described. This system interconnects commercial private branch exchanges (PBXs) through an 8 × 8 lithium niobate time-multiplexed switching network. It is shown that the dilated Benes architecture provides a switching network that is not limited by crosstalk. In addition, signal loss does not significantly constrain the switch size when an optical amplifier is used. It is suggested that with the use of the dilated Benes architecture and the solution of the clock-synchronization problem guided-wave photonic switching is ideally suited for high-bandwidth services, such as broadband integrated services digital network (BISDN), that are likely to be offered in the future.