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In the past few years, the demand for telecommunications services beyond voice telephony has skyrocketed. For the growth of these services to continue at this rate, cost effective means of transporting and switching large amounts of information must be found. Although fiber optic transmission has significantly reduced the cost of transmission, switching high bandwidth signals remains expensive. While all electronic switching systems are certainly possible for these high bandwidth systems, considerable effort has been expended to reduce the cost of fiber optic connections between frames or racks of equipment separated by several meters. As an example, one can envision fiber-optic data links connecting the line units that receive and transmit data from the outside world with an electronic switching fabric. Optical data links, ODLs, can perform the optical to electrical conversions. Several of these optical data links can be electrically connected with electronic switching chips on a printed circuit board. As the demand for bandwidth increases, several hundred to several thousand optical fibers might be incident on the switching fabric. Discrete optical data links and parallel data links with up to 32 fibers per data link remain an expensive solution to transporting this information due to their per-link cost, physical size, and power dissipation. Power dissipation on the switching chips is high because of the need for electronic drivers for the high speed electrical interconnections between the switching chips and the data links. By integrating the O/E conversions directly onto the switching chips, lower cost and higher density systems can be built. In this paper, we describe preliminary results of an experimental optoelectronic switching network based on this lower cost solution. The network is designed to be part of an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network based on the Growable Packet Architecture. The switching chip consists of GaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum well modulators and detectors flip- chip bonded to silicon VLSI circuitry. The optical system images the inputs from a two dimensional fiber bundle onto the switching chip, provides optical fan-out of the signals from the fibers to the switching chip, and images the outputs from the chip onto the fiber bundle.
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