Engineering Commons^™

Design And Analysis Of Optical Layouts For Free Space Optical Switching, Kung-Meng Lo

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The Intelligent Reconfigurable Optical Switch (IROS) is an N x N optical switch that uses two reflective Liquid Crystal (LC) Spatial Light Modulators (SLM} in a "Z" configuration to steer the incoming beams from the input ports to the designated output ports. Currently, the maximum steering capacity of practical SLM is limited to few degrees. For a dense optical switch, this makes the optical path between the input and output fiber ports relatively long. When a Gaussian beam is switched from an input fiber port to an output fiber port in a long free space interconnection topology, the beam's illumination …