Performance of ring-resonator based optical backplane in high capacity routers

The use of architectures that implement optical switching without any need of optoelectronic conversion allows us to overcome the limits imposed by today’s electronic backplane, such as power consumption and dissipation, as well as power supply and footprint requirements. We propose a ring-resonator based optical backplanes for router line-card interconnections. In particular we investigate how the feasibility of the architecture is affected by the following parameters: number of line cards, switching-element round-trip losses, frequency drifting due to thermal variations and waveguide-crossing effects. Moreover, to quantify the signal distortions introduced by filtering operations, the noiseless eye diagrams for the different parameter conditions are shown in case of an on-off keying non-return-to-zero input signal at 10 Gb/s.