Digitally programmable wavelength-switching technology

As the information flow in the fiber rapidly increased, dense wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM) technology becomes the ultimate solution in meeting the challenge of huge bandwidth demand. In this paper, we introduce a novel wavelength slicing concept that results a digitally programmable wavelength switch for the DWDM networks. The wavelength switch demonstrated not only achieves wavelength filtering and signal routing operations in one single compact device, but also provides superior performance based on its innovative architecture. Moreover, this concept provides a scale factor of log/sub 2/ N for the controlling management, as the number of optical channel N is increased. This unique logarithm scaling relation will greatly simplify the hardware complexity to implement large-size WDM interconnection networks.