This team is developing an optical switch for optical data communication based on holographic patterns loaded onto Micro Opto Electro Mechanical Systems (MOMES). At the nodes of a fiber optic network, and increasingly appearing in massive data centers, optical switches dynamically redirect the output beam of one fiber to the input of another one, establishing a communication link between two points. The current technology for optical switches (3D MOEMS) employs an array of millimeter size mirrors on gimbal supports to steer the light beam from one fiber to another. The principal barriers to the deployment of these optical switches have been their cost, inadequate switching speeds, insufficient number of ports, and reliability. In the switch developed by this team, the light is not reflected but diffracted toward a predefined direction. This principle of diffraction allows the interconnection of any of the input fiber ports to any of the output fiber ports, making the switch truly non-blocking. This also allows for a faster reconfiguration speed, about 100 times faster than the current technology, enhanced robustness and scalability to a large number of ports. Due to the nature of the diffractive technology, the proposed switch has the added benefits of lower power consumption and price per port than commercially available alternatives.
With the introduction of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs the need for new connections has increased dramatically. Applications such as cloud computing, videoconferencing, social media, online gaming, and video-on-demand rely on high bandwidth to provide content from the data center to the end user. Any device that can assist in increasing available bandwidth and lowering costs has a strong chance to be commercially successful. Current switch technology is not sufficiently matching the growth rate due to their speed, power consumption, and scalability limitations. In order to meet the challenge of a faster and more cost effective Internet, the team has demonstrated a new type of optical switch that can perform 100 times faster than the current state of the art technologies. The system they propose will also offer improved reliability and scalability.
