A High-Radix, Low-Latency Optical Switch for Data Centers

We demonstrate an optical switch design that can scale up to a thousand ports with high per-port bandwidth (25 Gbps+) and low switching latency (40 ns). Our design uses a broadcast and select architecture, based on a passive star coupler and fast tunable transceivers. In addition we employ time division multiplexing to achieve very low switching latency. Our demo shows the feasibility of the switch data plane using a small testbed, comprising two transmitters and a receiver, connected through a star coupler.