Design and Analysis of a New Class of WDM Optical Interconnect Architectures

In this paper, we develop a new class of three-stage Clos-like wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical interconnects with reduced hardware cost and control complexity. A novel WDM crossbar switch is developed and is used as a building block for designing the proposed class of WDM interconnects. We parameterize the design space and give a complete characterization of the proposed class. Our analysis of the hardware design complexity shows that the proposed design compares favorably to most existing WDM interconnects. We also show that the proposed crossbar switch and the new class of WDM interconnects admit most existing routing algorithms with simple extensions.