Optical Packet Switch With Distributed Control Based on InP Wavelength-Space Switch Modules

We demonstrate, for the first time, system operation and performance evaluation of a monolithically integrated InP optical wavelength-and-space switching module (OWSSM) as a key building block for implementing an integrable optical packet switch (OPS) with highly distributed control. The design of the semiconductor optical amplifier-based optical gates allows the OWSSM to be directly controlled by the low-voltage digital pins of a field-programmable gate array processor. This leads to the advantage of control simplicity and power efficiency. We demonstrate dynamic switching and contention resolution in the OPS with four wavelength 40 Gb/s NRZ-OOK optical packets per input port. Error free switching operation is achieved with a 4 dB penalty, switching time of 25 ns, and energy consumption of 66 pJ/bit. These results indicate that the integrated optical module could potentially be used to build up a large scale OPS with a negligible increase of latency.