Abstract

One of the early drivers of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) has been the promise for transparent optical networking.¹ As of yet, this vision has not turned into a commercial reality; basically all networking functionalities beyond point-to-point transport are still done in electronics and thus require opto-electronic conversions. There is no question that optics will more and more displace electronics in any aspect of transport even in back-plane and board-to-board connections. But will photons eventually replace electrons in switching and routing? Optical switches do not, in general, make bit-by-bit decisions but rather route entire bit-stream without looking inside the data and as a consequence they have two inherent advantages over electronic switches: they have almost unlimited throughput bandwidth and their power consumption is low.

© 2002 Optical Society of America