Design and Performance of Large Port Count Optical Switches for Intra Data Centre Application

This paper discusses the performances of large port count optical switches based on silicon photonics technologies for creating optical-circuit/electrical-packet hybrid switching systems applicable to hyperscale data centres. The low control latency and ultra-low blocking probability of optical switches are demonstrated; both are made possible by optical switch parallelism that matches the trend in merchant silicon switch chip advances and by a decentralized control mechanism. The analytical results of optical switch set-up/tear-down control latency are presented, and less than 20 μs latency for 200 m link length is derived.