The demand for large-capacity photonic switching systems will increase as regular broadband ISDN (B-ISDN) spreads and full-motion video terminals replace telephones. Large-scale and economical optical fiber transmission lines have been built based on time-division (TD) multiplexing. To reduce costs, it is important to increase the channel multiplexity of both transmission and switching systems by using TD and wavelength-division (WD) or frequency-division (FD) technologies. We surveyed photonic switching systems' architecture and switching network structures. Switching can be divided into circuit or synchronous transfer mode (STM) switching, and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching. A variety of photonic STM and ATM switching systems based on the two switching technologies have recently been proposed and demonstrated.