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Incorporating Optics into Internet Routers

 

Objective

We anticipate that optical technology will be used more and more in Internet routers - for switch fabrics, serial links, chip-to-chip communications, backplanes etc. The goal of our work is to explore the problems faced when building a very high capacity Internet router, and to identify the best use of optical technology to solve these problems.

Summary

The Optical Router (OR) project is a proposed collaborative research work in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University. OR brings together researchers with interests that range from photonic devices to network switch design. The initial team working on this project includes Profs. Mark Horowitz, Nick McKeown, David Miller, and Olav Solgaard, and their students.

The goal of this project is to motivate interesting research problems, and in particular those resulting from the combination of several fields involved in the design of such a router. Interesting fields of research include switch architecture, linecard design, packet look-up, clock recovery, optical fabric speed, tunable filters, tunable switches, switch control, link electronics and packaging.

A more detailed introduction is available. It frames the project, and describes more thoroughly the router architecture that will be used. If you are interested in joining this project, please feel free to contact one of the four professors listed above.

What's new

Project Papers and Talks

Talks

Papers

ORS

Please note that the OR project replaces the former Optical Router Seminar (ORS). In order to find older ORS slides, you can visit the former ORS web pages (fall 2001, spring 2001, winter 2001, fall 2000).

Note

Note for current project members: please don't forget to subscribe to the mailing-list. Do so by sending an e-mail to Isaac Keslassy (keslassy(at)stanford.edu), and please mention your advisor.

Funding

This project is supported by: