Packaged Nanoseconds Photonic Integrated Switches for Optical Metro and Data Center Interconnect Systems

Boosted by novel applications, to satisfy the scalable growth in both network traffic volume and connected endpoints while decreasing the cost and the energy consumption, transparent optical metro edge nodes and DC networks (DCNs) based on fast optical switches have been considered, featuring the data rate and format transparency and eliminating the power consuming O/E/O conversions. We present novel WDM photonic integrated switches with nanoseconds reconfiguration time and polarization independent operation. The WDM photonic integrated switches are capable to switching in the wavelength, space, and nanoseconds time domain to provide full flexibility and the required speed to achieve high throughput networks. Application to dynamic optical metro networks and optical DCN architectures based on distributed nanoseconds WDM photonics integrated switches will be presented.