Optical Time Division Switching Using Multiple Stages of Fiber Optic Delay Lines.

Optical Time Slot Interchanges (OTSIs) can be realized by guided wave LiNbO_3 optical switches performing space division switching of optical fiber delay lines. In this dissertation the problems of reducing the total length of fiber required and also of improving the SNR characteristics of this OTSI function are addressed. Several new OTSI architectures are proposed to reduce the total fiber length while still obtaining excellent SNR characteristics. These reduced fiber architectures include the Distributed Input Delay, Distributed Output Delay, the 2-Stage decomposition and the Distributed Input/Output Delay architectures. A Parallel Feedback (PFB) OTSI architecture is proposed that achieves the theoretical minimum number of delay fibers and the theoretical minimum total length of delay fiber for a given OTSI function. Broadcast OTSI architectures are proposed that enable the data in an incoming time slot to be broadcast to one or more outgoing time slots. These broadcast OTSI architectures include the Time-Dup-Time (TDT) system, Passive Splitter/Active Combiner (PS/AC) equivalents of the point -to-point reduced fiber architectures, and the broadcast PFB architecture. For each of the point-to-point and the broadcast OTSI architectures proposed, a detailed characterization of the architecture is performed including an analysis of number of fibers, total fiber length, number of optical switches and drivers, attenuation and SNR characteristics. This dissertation also proposes several new techniques for improving the system SNR and for calibration of the OTSI architectures. A cascaded noise reduction and a differential attenuation compensation technique are used to achieve a significantly higher system SNR at the output of the OTSI. In-situ calibration techniques are discussed to determine the optimum operating voltages for the LiNbO _3 switches when alternating between states every time slot. These techniques attempt to compensate for an output power drift problem associated with LiNbO _3 switch elements. Finally, this dissertation describes the construction of a working model of a 4 x 4 Distributed Input Delay OTSI to verify the architectural concepts and the SNR improvement and calibration techniques proposed herein. The performance of this experimental prototype is presented and analyzed.