LAUSR

Abstract. Our paper is focused on an extremely efficient structure for photonic crossbar switch using a fundamental building element, a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) in a Mach–Zehnder interferometer configuration. The switch is designed with a 10 Gbps rate and a high Q-factor of 30; a bit error rate ranging between ∼e  −  122 and ∼e  −  184 is achieved. In addition, the designed photonic switch model is reliable in terms of having an extinction ratio of 16 dB on average. High optical signal-to-noise ratio values, ranging between 101 and 104 dB, provide the low interference of noise in the required signals. It is observed that the proposed configuration is fast enough to provide a switching time ranging between 0.146 and 0.227 ns and is feasible in scaling the ports with an increase in the number of users to maintain a good quality factor. Hence, the proposed architecture can be taken as a solution for challenges in future datacenter network switching.