Optical Performance of Non-Blocking 4x4 Optical Switch: Simulation and Experiment

A prototype of pure non-blocking 4x4 optical LC switch was designed and built. This switch is based on conventional LCD technology, where the each pixel controlled the polarization state of the light beam. An addressing algorithm was described. The optical performance of the switch, such as cross-talk and insertion loss, was simulated and experimentally studied. The suggested approach offers several advantages over the conventional cross-point architecture such as: cost; complexity; size; adjustment; and optical performance