Abstract

A digital fiber-optic recirculating delay line with up to 17K bytes of storage capacity, a serial shift rate of 1.4 Gb/s, and a storage persistence time of >1ms has been demonstrated. The approach has been discussed earlier¹; it makes use of a digital electronic repeater to recirculate iteratively the ASK encoded binary data contained in a fiber loop of arbitrary length. Data stored in the loop may be written, read, and erased with electrooptic switches. Computers which interact with ring, star, or bus topologies can use this digital fiber-optic memory (DFOM) as a buffer register. There is usually a single buffer that is part of a computer or subordinant ring interface at a main ring network node. In register insertion ring architecture, two serial buffers work in tandem to allow on-demand access to the ring.² When used for temporary storage in high-speed packet oriented fiber-optic networks, the DFOM presented here will allow data to be stored or multiplexed up to the full ring bandwidth during periods between token possession.

© 1987 Optical Society of America