Optical switching networks to transport vast amounts of information are important for B-ISDN services. The wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is emerging as the dominant technology for future optical networks. This paper proposes a large capacity photonic ATM switch architecture using WDM technology. The switch consists of two stages. The first stage is a space switch and the second stage is a wavelength switch. The proposed switch is suitable for WDM optical ATM networks, that is, an input and an output of the switch are wavelength-division-multiplexed. The switch can provide very large ATM cell switching capacity, for instance, 10Tbit/s, with reasonable complexity. The main switch module of the proposed switch has a simple architecture, and reduces the amount of a buffer hardware by introducing the WDM concept.

Optical switching networks to transport vast amounts of information are important for B-ISDN services. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is emerging as the dominant technology for future optical networks. A large capacity photonic ATM switch architecture using WDM technology is proposed in this paper. The proposed switch is suitable for WDM optical ATM networks, that is, an input and an output of the switch are wavelength division multiplexed. The basic switch module of the proposed switch has a simple architecture, and reduces the amount of a buffer hardware by introducing the WDM concept.