The scalability of photonic switches

The photonic switch deployed in optical cross connects promises transparency and ultra high switch capacity at a per port price that might be competitive to electronic switches in the future. An important factor for cost effectiveness of photonic switches is given through the scaling behaviour of switches at increasing port numbers with respect to insertion loss, footprint and complexity. The well known strictly nonblocking waveguide based switch architectures are compared to the novel single stage crossbar freespace switches and the three dimensional beamsteering switches. New design rules and analytical models based on Gaussian beam propagation theory are given. To cite this article: G. Blau, K. Loesch, C. R. Physique 4 (2003).