Analysis of linear crosstalk in photonic crossbar switches based on on/off gates

This paper presents expressions for the linear crosstalk and the resulting error rate degradation in a photonic switch based on on/off gates, considering cyclostationary interference among digital signals. The periodically time-varying interference accounts for the dependencies of error probability both on the spectrum of transmitted signals and on random bit-skews between channels. This paper quantitatively verifies the intuitions that bit-aligned channels increase the crosstalk power penalty, and that a sharp modulating pulse improves error probability. These dependencies on spectrum and bit-skews become noticeable at high crosstalk levels caused by either a low contrast ratio or a large switch size.