Scalability of Optical Interconnects Based on Microring Resonators

Abstract

This letter investigates the use of optical microring resonators as switching elements (SEs) in large optical interconnection fabrics. We introduce a simple physical-layer model to assess scalability in crossbar- and Benes-based architectures. We also propose a new dilated SE that improves scalability to build fabrics of several terabits per second of aggregate capacity.