Approaches to polarisation handling in optical switching systems

Polarisation independent optical switches will be required to implement future broadband networks. The authors have reviewed the engineering solutions which can be implemented and analysed two different circuit requirements within the network. The first was a high speed 1×16 optical switch developed for <5 ns reconfiguration, which employed polarisation dependent optical switch elements with 5 V drive and integral polarisation filter, allowing operation in a polarisation scrambled network. In contrast polarisation independent 1×16 and 1×32 switch matrix results are presented for a low speed switching application