Fast Wavelength Switching PIC for Datacenters Transceivers

Optical switches have the potential of significantly lowering datacenter networks costs and power by reducing the number of expensive and power-hungry transceivers that are required by today’s electrically-switched network. Electrical switching has become a bottleneck for data center networks and there optical switching can play a pivotal role in overcoming this issue. Our group, in collaboration with Microsoft Research labs in Cambridge, is developing a low cost and high-performance InP PIC transmitter capable of nanosecond wavelength tuning in the C-band to be applied to such applications.