The silicon nitride (Si3N4) planar waveguide platform has enabled a broad class of low-loss planar-integrated devices and chip-scale solutions that benefit from transparency over a wide wavelength range (400-2350 nm) and fabrication using wafer-scale processes. As a complimentary platform to silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and III-V photonics, Si3N4waveguide technology opens up a new generation of system-on-chip applications not achievable with the other platforms alone. The availability of low-loss waveguides (3N4has expanded the practical application of optical signal processing functions that can reduce energy consumption, size and cost over today's digital electronic solutions. Researchers have been able to push the performance photonic-integrated components beyond other integrated platforms, including ultrahigh Q resonators, optical filters, highly coherent lasers, optical signal processing circuits, nonlinear optical devices, frequency comb generators, and biophotonic system-on-chip. This review paper covers the history of low-loss Si3N4waveguide technology and a survey of worldwide research in a variety of device and applications as well as the status of Si3N4foundries.

If optical routers are to become reality, we will need several new optical technologies, one of which is to build sufficiently large optical buffers. Building optical buffers for routers is daunting: Today's electronic routers often hold millions of packets, which is well beyond the capabilities of optical technology. In this paper, we argue that two new results offer a solution. First, we show that the size of buffers in backbone routers can be made very small-just about 20 packets per linecard-at the expense of a small loss in throughput. Second, we show that integrated delay line optical buffers can store a few dozen packets on a photonic chip. With the combination of these two results, we conclude that future Internet routers could use optical buffers.

The experimental demonstration of MOSAIC, a reconfigurable WDM add/drop network with subcarrier multiplexed control, is presented. The MOSAIC network implements the optical layer protocol to support bit-rate transparent multichannel lightpaths. Two types of add/drop multiplexers are implemented and combined in a three-node experiment. Multihop lightpaths are established giving an end-to-end bit error rate of better than 10/sup -9/ at 1.2 Gbps. The reconfigurable add/drop multiplexer is based on a novel dilated 2/spl times/2 acoustooptic filter switch crossconnect and an analog optoelectronic crossconnect that drives a ten-wavelength laser array transmitter up to 2.5 Gbps per wavelength. The fixed wavelength add/drop multiplexer utilizes a fast digitally tunable laser transmitter. Both add/drop multiplexers support bit-rate transparent 2R optoelectronic regeneration as well as wavelength translation. Subcarrier multiplexing on each wavelength is used to support channel state monitoring and channel equalization as well as transmission of digital network control information. Systems experiments demonstrate cascaded 2R optoelectronic regeneration with wavelength translation and cascaded multichannel optical switching with up to seven hops. It is shown that combining cascaded 2R optoelectronic regeneration with cascaded multichannel optical switching can be used to balance jitter accumulation and amplified spontaneous emission generated amplitude noise to yield high signal-to-noise ratio for lightpaths.

Photonic packet switches offer high speed, data rate and format transparency, and flexibility required by future computer communications and cell-based telecommunications networks. In this paper, we review experimental progress in state-of-the-art photonic packet switches with an emphasis on all-optical guided-wave systems. The term all-optical implies that the data portion of a packet remains in optical format from the source to the destination. While the data remain all-optical, both optical and optoelectronic techniques have been used to process packet routing functions based on extremely simple routing protocols. An overview of the design issues for all-optical photonic packet switching is given and contrasted with electronic packet switch implementations. Low-level functions that have been experimentally implemented include routing, contention resolution, synchronization, and header regeneration. System level demonstrations, including centralized photonic switching and distributed all-optical multihop networks, will be reviewed.>