Polymer Based All-Optic Reconfigurable Interconnects.

In Phase I of this project, POC successfully implemented a prototype all-optic reconfigurable polymer-based crossbar switch. POCs all-optic reconfigurable polymer-based crossbar switch represents a unique combination of polymer techniques, simple geometry optics, and waveguide technology. These three essential technologies are original POC developments. POCs crossbar switch will provide reconfigurability, large fan-out, and radiation hardening. This is a new technology for both parallel and distributed processing and communication networks. The Phase I results have shown that POCs crossbar switch can offer a number of important advantages not achievable by either electronic interconnects or currently existing all-optic reconfigurable interconnects. These advantages include 1 very low power sources -100 mW, 2 relatively high interconnect reconfigurability time, 3 high data rates over 1 Gbsec, 4 low bit error rate 10- 10, 5 very large fan-out capability 1000 channels, 6 very low manufacturing cost, and 7 very high erasability. It is expected that POCs crossbar switch performance will be superior to existing electronic and optical interconnection approaches. In Phase 1, POC also demonstrated the feasibility of commercialization in the area of multimedia, video conferencing, and other communication applications. Crossbar switch, Birefringent photopolymer, Optical interconnect.