Projecte fet en col.laboració amb la Facoltà di Ingegneria dell’Informazione. Politecinco de TorinoThe aim of this thesis is to present and analyse optical interconnection
architectures based on microring resonators.
The trend of meeting large bandwidth and strict latency requirements
in both global on-chip and off-chip communication face critical challenges in
maintaining a sustainable performance-per-watt. Optical technologies support
the immense bandwidth allowed by wavelength division multiplexed
(WDM) while could offer a significant power saving switching capabilities.
Microring resonators have received considerable attention as promising
technologies for realizing photonic integrated circuits. Their small footprint
and their capacity for processing high-bandwidth WDM data can lead these
devices become the key elements for the switch nodes in next-generation
telecommunication networks.
This thesis firstly describes the basic principles of operation of a microring
resonator defining 1x2 basic switching element (1B-SE). Then, the 2x2
basic SE (2B-SE) based on two 1B-SEs jointly controlled and the new 2x2
mirrored SE (2M-SE) are characterised as atomic building elements for interconnection
architectures. The severe asymmetric behaviour presented by
those SEs could limit the scalability of classical optical switching fabrics and
we aim at balancing the complexity and optical signal level.
In a second stage, the well-known switching theory is revised in order to
classify the interconnection architectures according to their characteristics
when using that SEs as building element. It is applied an exhaustive procedure
to obtain the performance of classical Crossbar and Benes structures
and of the newly proposed Mirroring and HBC structures.
Thereafter, using as a starting point for each analysed structure the characterisation
previously obtained, the scalability response of larger switching
fabrics is explored. Then we define a construction rule for the new proposed
architectures of which we assess the complexity in terms of used microring
