Recent advances in photonic processing

Summary form only given. One way of catering for the high demand likely to be placed upon the capacity of telecommunication networks of the 21st century is optical time division multiplexing (OTDM). In association with these ultra-high speed optical pipes, a variety of processing schemes are required in order to facilitate the manipulation and management of the data throughout the network. At these high speeds, switching must be performed on the timescale of a few picoseconds. Therefore, all-optical photonic processing technologies will have a key role to play in performing essential routing functions