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To: BDR who wrote (35215)	11/26/2000 10:16:03 AM
From: BDR	Respond to of 54805

More on optical routers taken from J Fieb's post over here: Message 14880358 Mirror, Mirror... But mirrors don't know anything about the data inside the stream of light. And even if they did, they move too slowly to switch those packets. Mirrors are built using a mechanical technology known as MEMS, which can only rotate the beam of light once every thousandth of a second or so. At speeds of 10 billion bits per second and higher, which is now the standard for big telecom networks, packets of data arrive at a router every 40 billionths of a second — far too fast for MEMS, in other words. One of the most intriguing academic presentations at Opticomm was given by Dr. Ben Yoo, from the University of California at Davis, who is working on photonic packet routers using what are called "wavelength converters." These devices can switch each packet of data by changing its color to a new wavelength every billionth of a second, or nanosecond. "Basically, we're building an all-optical router," he remarked in his talk. Yoo says the resulting optical router can scale to about 1,000 times the largest electronic router and the speed could be 1,000 times faster. That would result in 1,000 trillion bits, or one "petabit" per second switching, something unthinkable for electronic routers relying on repeated signal conversion between optics and electronics. The secret is Yoo's design for wavelength converters fabricated in a standard semiconductor material that has no moving parts like MEMS. Firms such as SmartMoney pick Vitesse Semiconductor (VTSS) already know how to fashion such high-speed semiconductor materials in high volume at commercial prices. Yoo's all-optical router research is in two phases, the first utilizing off the-shelf commercial components, and the second utilizing advanced wavelength converters.