Design and Performance of Delivery and Coupling Switch Board for Large Scale Optical Path Cross-Connect System

Atsushi WATANABE  Satoru OKAMOTO  Masafumi KOGA  Ken-ichi SATO  Masayuki OKUNO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E81-B       pp.1203-1212
Publication Date: 1998/06/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Category: Optical Communication
Keyword: 
optical communication,  optical path network,  cross-connect system,  optical switch,  

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Summary: 
This paper describes the recently developed 816 delivery and coupling switch (DC-switch) boards for constructing a 320-Gb/s throughput (2. 5 Gb/s 8 multiplexed wavelengths 16 incoming/outgoing link pairs) optical path cross-connect (OPXC) system based on wavelength path (WP) and virtual wavelength path (VWP) schemes. The DC-switch-based OPXC system, compared with conventional space division switch (SD-switch)-based OPXC system architecture, is shown to be superior in terms of; i) high link modularity, ii) upgradability from WP network to VWP network, iii) better transmission characteristics, and iv) lower total switching power consumption. Therefore, the DC-switch-based OPXC system can realize cost-effective optical path networks. The developed DC-switches exploit the silica-based planar lightwave circuit (PLC) technologies, and DC-switch board size is 300330 mm2 (one switch). The worst values of the insertion loss of the board, ON/OFF ratio, and polarization dependent loss are 14. 5 dB, 34 dB and 0. 5 dB, respectively. Moreover, even though switching is realized by thermo-optic effects, the optical output level varies by only 0. 7 dB and 0. 8 dB for ON- and OFF-state signals, respectively, when the environmental temperature is varied from 5 to 65 .