An optoelectronic CMOS switch core for a Terabit optical local area network

Optoelectronic CMOS integrated circuits can support thousands of optical I/O per substrate, and can be used to realize optical Local Area Networks with Terabit capacities. The design of an optoelectronic CMOS switch core which interconnects 32 parallel fiber ribbons, each with 32 fibers clocked at 300 MHz, to switch 300 Gigabits/sec of data is described. The proposed optoelectronic CMOS switch uses several extremely fast self-routing CMOS “concentrators” or “arbiters”, which can make routing decisions within a few nanoseconds. The switch has a regular topology suitable for efficient VLSI layout, which leads to very high clock rates and to substantially higher throughputs than possible with all-electrical switching circuits. The switch design is optimized using the Synopsis state of the art Computer Aided Design (CAD) optimization tool. Using 0.8 μm CMOS the switch can be clocked at 300 MHz, and using 0.25 μm CMOS the switch can be clocked at approx. 1 GHz. A prototype integrated circuit has been fabricated through the ARPA COOP workshop and is summarized