Demonstration of optical ATM header decoding by spectroholographic filtering

Summary form only given. While fiber-optic technology has the intrinsic bandwidth needed for the backbone transmission, the creation of high bandwidth network to users remains a challenge. One of the impediments to the development of this technology is an optical header decoding technology. We have demonstrated, for the first time to our knowledge, optical header decoding of addresses using spectroholographic filtering. This result was achieved by first storing the headers in the programming mode and then impinging the sample with the incoming headers. The headers were decoded with a good signal-to-background ratio whenever a match to the incoming header was found.