Hybrid Architecture for Optical Interconnection Based on Micro Ring Resonators

Future interconnection subsystems for switches and routers must overcome physical limitations of current electronic backplanes in order to achieve aggregate bandwidth much greater than today. Driven by this consideration we study the scalability of switching architectures implementing backplanes based on optical interconnection technology. In particular, this paper deals with the issue of interconnecting the line cards of a switch/router exploiting the wavelength agility of the transmitters and the switching/filtering capabilities of Micro Ring Resonators. To accomplish this task, the resonators deployed in the backplane are both tunable and fixed, thus defining a hybrid architecture. In our analysis we address feasibility and scalability issues in terms of maximum number of interconnected cards, taking various design parameters into account. Moreover, we perform a preliminary power consumption analysis of the proposed backplane architecture.