A wide-band nonblocking 2/spl times/2 switching node for a SPINet network

We present SPINet (Scalable Photonic Integrated Network), a novel optical packet switching architecture that is chiefly designed for implementation with photonic integrated circuit technology, where fiber delay lines cannot be employed. A novel physical layer acknowledgment protocol is introduced to mitigate the penalty associated with message dropping. The architecture's concepts are described and the fabrication of a prototype semiconductor optical amplifier-based switching node is reported. Routing of 160-Gb/s (16/spl times/10 Gb/s) optically addressed messages with bit-error rates better than 10/sup -12/ and the successful back-propagating transmission of acknowledgment pulses are experimentally demonstrated.