Transmission analysis of ring resonator based optical back planes in high capacity routers

Abstract

Today‟s never ceasing thrust towards the achievement of greater aggregate bandwidth at lower cost has been completely steering the evolution of communication systems. Today‟s electronic backplane has many limitations such as power consumption and dissipation, power supply and footprint requirements. To cope with this high demand of greater bandwidth we need an architecture which implements optical switching without any need of Optoelectronic conversion. One of the proposed solutions is ring resonator based optical backplane [1] for router line card interconnection. This research work presents a detailed performance analysis of the proposed architecture, considering all the real world parameters affecting the architecture such as number of line cards, switching-element round-trip losses, frequency drifting due to thermal variations and waveguide-crossing effects. In particular to quantify the signal distortions introduced by filtering operations, the bit error rate for the different parameter conditions are shown in case of an on-off keying non-return-to- zero input signal at 10 Gb/s.