Multichannel Acousto-Optic Crossbar Switch with Arbitrary Signal Fan-Out

摘要

We have previously described the operation and performance of an acousto-opticphotonic switching architecture. In our architecture we rely on Bragg diffraction of light by monotone acoustic waves in a multichannel acousto-optic cell. Light that passes through an acoustic channel is efficiently deflected at an angle that is proportional to an applied radio frequency (rf), so that we steer light to an appropriate output port through proper selection of the rf. Simultaneous interconnections between a single input port and several output ports, or signal fan-out, are obtained by superimposing two or more acoustic waves within a single acoustic channel to provide the necessary multiple beam deflection. In this Technical Note we introduce an acoustooptic crossbar switching architecture that has arbitrary signal fan-out capability; we also point out ways in which the performance of this architecture deviates from our point-to-point crossbar switch and present experimental results that illustrate some of these differences.