500 Mbit/s operation of a multifunctional binaryoptical switching fabric

A cascadable binary optical routing switch with improved switching performance has been demonstrated by integrating vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with heterojunction bipolar transistors and pin photodiodes. The reconfigurable routing of optical signals, and their conversion between electrical and optical formats, have been achieved at high speed (400–500 Mbit/s), and with an optical gain of 7.5 dB.