Low-loss and polarization insensitive 32 x 4 optical switch for ROADM applications
Chinese Academy of SciencesReconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADM) are critical components in flexible optical networks for the dynamic channel reassignment. A university and industrial collaborative effort in China has led to the development of a compact, integrated optical switch matrix for the ROADM applications that is both low-loss and polarization-independent. Besides optical networks, the newly developed switch matrix platform will open new possibilities in other applications such as quantum processing and photonic neural networks.