Nanoseconds photonic integrated switches for optical data center interconnect systems

With the aim to satisfy the scalable growth in both network traffic volume and connected endpoints while decreasing the cost and the energy consumption, transparent optical DC networks (DCNs) based on fast optical switches have been considered, featuring the data rate and format transparency and eliminating the power consuming O/E/O conversions. In this work, we propose and experimentally assess novel optical DCN architectures based on distributed and buffer-less nanoseconds WDM photonics integrated switches. The WDM photonic integrated switches are capable to switching in the wavelength, space, and nanoseconds time domain to provide full flexibility and the required speed to achieve high throughput DCN networks. Disaggregated DCN architectures enabled by the fast WDM PIC switch will be also presented