Influence of cross talk on the scalability of large OTDM interconnects using a novel fast time-slot tuner

Summary form only given. The scalability for optical multichannel networks and interconnects is an important design issue to accommodate an ever-growing number of users. It is therefore important that the channel selector at each node should be scalable to a large number of channels. However, the accumulation of interferometric cross-talk from each node may impose a strict constraint on the size of such a system. Recently we demonstrated a 1024-channel TDM tuner, which can be rapidly reconfigured to access any channel in a 50-Gbit/s OTDM system. Based on the cross-talk properties of the tuner, we consider in this paper the scalability of an OTDM interconnect system for a large number of nodes. The TDM tuner consists of a passive feedforward delay-lattice of k stages and two modulators at the input and output of the delay.