PIC-Based $1\times N$ Flexible WaveBand-Selective Switch
Dan M. Marom, Chris Roeloffzen, Ioannis Tomkos
Abstract
We propose an alternative optical switch supporting future trends in large-capacity optical networks, allowing flexible waveband definition and large radix output switching. The switch comprised two functional parts: an adaptive FIR lattice filter for carving an input spanning S+C+L bandwidth into up to four bands and a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$4\times N$</tex> crossbar switch for a large addressing space. The flexible waveband selective switch (flex-WBSS) can be used in a route-and-select ROADM node, supporting ultrawide bandwidth spectral support and SDM link multipliers. The flex-WBSS can be implemented in a PIC-scale solution, affording significant size and cost savings over free-space based wavelength-selective switches.