FREE-SPACE OPTICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF A FEED FORWARD CROSSBAR NETWORK

The crossbar network has been a popular topology for proposed guided wave optical switching systems as well as for proposed free-space optical switching and computing systems. However, these crossbar system proposals suffer from fundamental problems that may limit the overall size of the network. A new implementation of a free-space optical crossbar network (the feed forward crossbar network) is proposed which may be able to overcome these problems. One-dimensional and two-dimensional implementations are described. The resulting optical interconnections in both implementations are space-invariant interconnections, so the optical hardware requirements are minimal. © 1990 Optical Society of America.