Optical wavelength-space cross connect switch architecture

A multi-wavelength optical cross-connect switch architecture incorporates a plurality of wavelength-selective optical cross-connect (WSXC) switch fabrics that receive multi-wavelength input signals distributed by one or more optical slicers and generate multi-wavelength output signals that are combined by a plurality of optical combiners. The WSXC fabrics employ fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) as wavelength-selective elements. Using this architecture, the number of multi-wavelength channels carried by each WSXC is reduced from the number of channels present in each multi-wavelength input signal. In addition, the wavelength spacing between adjacent channels carried by each WSXC is increased over the spacing between adjacent channels in each multi-wavelength input signal.