Graphics enhanced version of this site

Are Crossbars Really Dead? The Case for Optical Time Domain Multiplexing
A. Nowatzyk and P. Prucna
International Symposium on Computer Architecture, June, 1995.

Jump to: Download | Abstract | Notes | Text Reference | BibTeX Reference

Adobe portable document format (pdf) [140 KB]
Compressed postscript (ps.gz) [317 KB]

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Crossbar switches are rarely considered for large, scalable multiprocessor interconnect systems because they require O(n2) switching elements, are difficult to control efficiently and are hard to implement once their size becomes too large to fit on one integrated circuit. However these problems are technology dependent and a recent innovation in fiber optic devices has led to a new implementation of crossbar switches that does not share these problems while retaining the full advantages of a crossbar switch: low latency, high throughput, complete connectivity and multicast capability. Moreover, this new technology has several characteristics that allow a distributed control system which scales linearly in the number of attached nodes. The innovation that led to this research is an optical and-gate that can be used to demultiplex multiple high speed data streams that are carried on one common optical medium. Optical time domain multiplexing can combine the data from many nodes and broadcast the result back to all nodes. This paper discusses OTDM technology only to the extent necessary to understand its characteristics and capabilities. The main contribution lies in the description and analysis of interconnect architectures that utilize OTDM to achieve a level performance that is beyond electronic means. It is expected that cost-reduced OTDM systems will become competitive with the next generation of interconnect systems.

Number of pages: 10

A. Nowatzyk and P. Prucna, "Are Crossbars Really Dead? The Case for Optical Time Domain Multiplexing," International Symposium on Computer Architecture, June, 1995.

@inproceedings{Nowatzyk_1995_4943,
   author = "Andreas Nowatzyk and P. Prucna",
   title = "Are Crossbars Really Dead? The Case for Optical Time Domain Multiplexing",
   booktitle = "International Symposium on Computer Architecture",
   month = "June",
   year = "1995"
}