Universal method for constructing N-port non-blocking optical router based on 2 x 2 optical switch for photonic networks-on-chip

We propose a universal method for constructing N-port non-blocking optical router for photonic networks-on-chip, in which all microring (MR) optical switches or Mach-Zehnder (M-Z) optical switches behave as 2 x 2 optical switches. The optical router constructed by the proposed method has minimum optical switches, in which the number of the optical switches is reduced about 50% compared to the reported optical routers based on MR optical switches and more than 30% compared to the reported optical routers based on M-Z optical switches, and therefore is more compact in footprint and more power-efficient. We also present a strict mathematical proof of the non-blocking routing of the proposed N-port optical router. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America