Ken-ichi KITAYAMA

NT&T Oiptical Network systems Laboratories, 1-2356, Take, Yokosuka, 238-03 Japan

(Accepted July 22, 1994)

An ultrafast photonic asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch is proposed that incorporates a holographic buffer memory and an optical parallel routing controller. Ultrafast serial-to-parallel conversion of the temporal profiles of optical cells into spatial patterns is used to process optical cells in space in a parallel manner. The spatial pattern of the data payload is holographically recorded as a page in the optical buffer memory. The routing control to establish the switching state consists of header recognition performed by optical matched filtering, followed by control signal generation via reference to a lookup table. The ultimate throughput of the switch is expected to be 10³ Tb/s with line bit-rates of 17 Tb/s.

Key words : ATM switch, cell, routing, serial-to-parallel conversion, holography, optical matched filtering, lookup table, throughput