Optical packet switch with distributed control based on InP wavelength-space switch modules

We demonstrate for the first time system operation and performance evaluation of a monolithically integrated InP optical wavelength-and-space switching module (OWSSM) as a key building block for implementing an integrable optical packet switch (OPS) with highly distributed control. The design of the SOA based optical gates allows the OWSSM to be directly controlled by the low voltage digital pins of an FPGA processor. This leads to the advantage of control simplicity and power efficiency. We demonstrate dynamic switching and contention resolution in the OPS with four wavelength 40 Gb/s NRZ-OOK optical packets per input port. Error free switching operation is achieved with 4 dB penalty, switching time of 25 ns and energy consumption of 66 pJ/bit. These results indicate that the integrated optical module could potentially be used to build up a large scale OPS with negligible increase of latency.