DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS OF THE OPTICAL-IMAGE CROSSBAR SWITCH

Novel types of an optical image crossbar switch based on multiple imaging systems are proposed and demonstrated. The optical systems are based on gometric optics; accordingly, the systems have a large space bandwidth 20 x 20 switching for images with 10(3) x 10(3) pixels is realizable with the proposed optical image crossbar switches. A preliminary experiment is conducted for one of the proposed configurations. The possibility of incorporating the proposed optical switching system into optical parallel processing systems is particularly significant.