Self-clocked optical control of a self-routed photonic switch

Self-routing of 100-Mb/s data through a photonic switch is demonstrated. Individual data bits are subencoded into one of 124 destination addresses using a pulse-interval technique with 80-ps pulses. At the switch, optical processing is used to read the address of an incoming bit and to route that bit to the correct switch output without the aid of an external clock. Although the pulse-interval technique is presented in a bit-switching context, it can readily be extended to a packet-switching environment