It is often claimed that future systems will necessarily be all-optical, because electronic devices are not fast enough to keep up with the increase in fiber capacity. However, two objections are commonly raised: first, optical systems need many basic optical components, which are typically very expensive; and second, optical systems need many switch reconfigurations, which are typically very s...

We describe polysilicon micromotors with diffraction gratings fabricated on the polished surface of the polysilicon rotor for optical switching applications. The motors have rotor diameters of 0.5–2 mm with grating elements having periods of 1.80 and 3.86 mm. These microswitches have rise times of 300 ms and settling times of 500 ms when driven by a 65-V switching pulse. The diffractive nature ...

An active optical access network architecture with our newly developed PLZT ((Pb, La) (Zr, Ti)O3) high-speed optical switch is introduced, with a view to realizing the nextgeneration high capacity scalable access network. This system is developed based on the latest IEEE standard of PON (10G-EPON; IEEE802.3av) in consideration of the coordination with future high capacity PON. PLZT high-speed o...

This paper reports the design, fabrication, and testing of a draw-bridge micromirror and to be integrated a monolithic 4 × 4 optical crossconnect (OXC) having dimensions about 4 mm × 4 mm. The OXC is composed of 16 individual draw-bridge micromirror, is fabricated by the surface micromachining technology and then manually assembled. In each draw-bridge micromirror, is driven by electrostatic fo...

The performance of an optical switch that handles contention resolution using a fiber delay line (FDL) is modeled and evaluated. We propose using a simple optical buffer that contains only a single FDL for contention resolution. The analytical model derived for the performance of an optical switch based on this buffer is verified using simulations. The analytical model can be utilized with both...

This paper describes the optical circuit that enables to extract address from a transmitted cell in an all-optical manner. Nonlinear optical loop mirrors (NOLM’s) are used as all-optical switches in order to confirm the operation of the proposed circuit. The control pulses synchronized with address bits are generated from the transmitted cell. The address bits are successfully extracted without...