Proposal for a High-Speed, Time-Multiplexed Photonic Switch.

To become a commercial reality, photonic switching in titanium- diffused lithium niobate must be demonstrated. Since most single sources use less than the fiber transmission capacity, time-multiplexed switching should be shown. We propose a three- phased approach to build a time-multiplexed photonic switch in which each input carries over a gigabit of data per second. Source data will be 45 Mb/s channels, block multiplexed to create the gigabit-per-second stream. The photonic switch will be a non-blocking space switch with a Passive splitter/Active Combiner architecture. It will reconfigure at every timeslot, dynamically routing individual channel blocks. With this experiment, we hope to demonstrate the capability of guided-wave photonics for time-multiplexed switching.