Optical Switching

12Nonlinear All‐Optical Switch

Rajarshi Dhar¹, Arpan Deyasi², and Angsuman Sarkar³

¹ Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, IIEST, Shibpur, Howrah, West Bengal, India

² Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, RCC Institute of Information Technology, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

³ Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Kalyani Government Engineering College, Kalyani, West Bengal, India

12.1 Introduction

The limitations of electrical communication systems have led people to move to optical communication systems. The optical communication systems have proven to be much more advantageous over the electrical systems as they overcome the problems or limitations like bandwidth, speed, security, reduced system noise, and several other factors which are undesirable for a faithful and sustainable communication system [1, 2]. But one of the problems in optical systems is that of optical processing. The optical processors that have been developed until now can only process low‐speed signals or signals with low bit rates. The processors need electrical signals which are converted from optical signals are processed and then converted back to optical signals. This is done using the Optical‐Electrical‐Optical Switches or OEO Switches [3, 4]. Now this conversion and back‐conversion takes up a lot of power and time which are not desirable for high‐speed systems. Thus this leads to the need for all‐optical processing systems, which include ...