Photonic crystal WDM cross-connect with reconfigurable OCDMA functionality

This paper presents a WDM reconfigurable bi-directional optical cross-connect using chip-scale silicon photonics, with functionality of serving as an encoding source for OCDMA. The cross-connect utilizes slow-light photonic crystal waveguides as directional couplers to reduce the size and power requirements for reconfigurable operation, while similar photonic crystal elements can be used to impose an encoding technique on the propagating optical data signals. This proposed architecture allows for fast, efficient, low power, bi-directional routing for WDM or OCDMA optical networks architecture.