Open AccessDesign of optical multi/demultiplexers composed of bidirectional 2 × 2 switch elements for reducing component count
Author(s) -
Obara H.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
electronics letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.375
H-Index - 146
eISSN - 1350-911X
pISSN - 0013-5194
DOI - 10.1049/el.2015.1526
Subject(s) - blocking (statistics) , optical switch , component (thermodynamics) , planar , topology (electrical circuits) , connection (principal bundle) , computer science , mathematics , electronic engineering , optics , physics , engineering , combinatorics , geometry , computer network , computer graphics (images) , thermodynamics
A component‐efficient design for optical multi/demultiplexers (OMDPXs) relying on 2 × 2 switch elements (SEs) with a bidirectional property is described for the first time. First, the observation is made that some 2 × 1 or 1 × 2 SEs used in conventional OMDPXs have been implemented with part of a 2 × 2 SE. A novel design of OMDPXs fully utilising the connection capability of 2 × 2 SEs is presented. The SE count in the design becomes virtually half of that in the conventional design because a 2 × 2 SE is equivalent to a pair of 2 × 1 and/or 1 × 2 SEs. Other basic characteristics such as insertion loss and cross‐talk are also approximated. Finally, the design provides an N × N optical switch composed of N ( N − 1)/2 2 × 2 SEs instead of N 2 for conventional optical cross‐bar switches, keeping the strictly non‐blocking capability unlike N ‐stage planar switches, which are rearrangeably non‐blocking while composed of the same number of SEs as the design.