Photonic Switching Using Directional Couplers

1. INTRODUCTION: In the past few years photonic switching has taken on several different meanings. In the most general case photonic switching refers to any system where the inputs to an interconnection network are streams of photons incoded with information and the outputs of the network are also streams of photons. AN example of this would be a switching system that is used to interconnect a large collection of fiber-optic cables.