| 摘要 |
Routers for trunk telecommunication systems currently operate at 2.5Gb/s. Next generation routers will be requires to switch 128 input data streams into 128 output data streams, each data stream being at a data rate of 10Gb/s. Current routers employ massively parallel electronic switches to route data at 1.25Gb/s. Such technology is reaching its limit and a new approach to high-speed switching is required. The present invention provides an apparatus and method for enabling such high-speed switching by providing a data compression apparatus which comprises a pulsed chirped laser (226) coupled to a modulator (218, 220), the modulator (218, 220) being coupled to a multiplexer (232) and a compressor (228). A chirped laser pulse having the duration of a data packet is modulated with data received on an input channel and then passed through the multiplexer (232) and the compressor (228) in order to generate a compressed modulated data pulse for high speed switching. Either the propagation time or the propagation speed through the compression medium (28) is linearly dependent upon the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation comprising each pulse. In this way the chirp is converted into compression.
|
