Optical Switching

9Photonic Crystal All‐Optical Switches

Rashmi Kumari, Anjali Yadav, and Basudev Lahiri

Nano Bio Photonics Group, Department of Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

9.1 Idea of Photonics

Electronic devices for applications such as information processing and signal communication have been used in past decades. These devices possess the inherent limitation of operating at higher frequencies and bandwidths due to power dissipation and hardware heating at such high frequencies. In contrast, optical devices can work better at higher frequencies or bandwidths. To meet the demand of increasing bandwidths, researchers today are moving towards optical devices and minimizing the role of electronic devices. Although optics is a solution to meet the increasing demand for higher operating frequencies or bandwidths, it has its physical limitations too. Electronic devices operate at very low energy (a few femtojoules), whereas optical devices cannot operate at such low energy. Optical devices require very high driving energy for their operation and are very large in size for their integration with other networking components. A lot of effort is needed to substitute electronic devices with optics ones as they have the limitation of confining light in small volumes [1]. Any desired device should also be integrable with other devices to reduce power consumption and operating costs. The use of photonics offers ...