Electrooptical switching in thin film waveguides for a computer communication bus.

A new crossing multimode channel waveguide electrooptical switch is described here. It has a 21-dB ONstate/OFF-state difference at 10 V of applied voltage, 0.4-dB insertion loss, 2.2-pF capacitance, and a total length less than 1.5 mm. It will be useful for providing a switching network for realizing an integrated optical computer communication data bus where electric signals from computers are converted into optical signals, switched by these switches, and then received and reconverted into electrical signals by a detector array.