Controller Receiver Data Control Clock Control Received Data TOAD Clock Time Slot Tuner

Although lightwave technology is meeting the demand for point-to-point and long-haul transport of digital information, routing packets at the nodes of the network has typically been carried out using electronically switched backplane routers. The growing capacity on the Internet is placing an ever greater demand on electronic routing technologies. While WDM can support large aggregate traffic bandwidths, it is difficult to perform routing functions which may involve challenging techniques such as dense wavelength conversion. Additionally, present WDM laser and filter tuning techniques rely upon slow technologies which increase the channel access latency and reduce the effective network bandwidth. Recent advances in optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) have proven this technologys capability to handle the switching and routing needs for future. Channel access in OTDM networks is achieved by using time slot tuners and all-optical demultiplexers. Timing precision of less than 1ps is required to tune, multiplex, and demultiplex individual channels within the OTDM frame. The computer interconnect we are constructing is based upon an OTDM broadcast star architecture. The high-level architecture and node design is shown in Fig. 1. Nodes transmit information at a slow data rate, , by modulating picosecond optical pulses. By using a scalable time slot tuner, the pulse is appropriately delayed to correspond to the desired destination time slot. Data pulses from all nodes are multiplexed into a time frame with an aggregate bandwidth of , where is the number of nodes in the network. The pulse spacing between adjacent channels is or typically less than 10ps to achieve 100+ Gbit/s. Ultrafast all-optical demultiplexers like the TOAD are used to extract the desired channel from the high capacity OTDM