SUDIPTO SUR |
A continuous biaxial scanner(like in the cartoon above) is at the heart of these large port count optical switches. The scanner may be electrostatically or electromagnetically actuated.
A n x n switch requires 2n scanners. Port counts may be as large as 4000x4000. The control problems
are at the level of individual scanners and for the complete system. In addition to feedback control architectures,
real-time optimization of optical power through each link has to be achieved to take care of non-uniformities.
Manufacturability of these systems is also dependent on the ability to "tune" new switches in an automated
way.
The implementation of this system is required to be 99.999% available (~5 mins of downtime in a year).
I deal with the entire spectrum of software development for OMMs scanner based product, which includes, in addition
to the above, a network based command and configuration interface. The entire system is implemented on a multi-processor,
embedded system with redundancy to avoid any single point failures.