Optical switches represent an appealing option to address the upcoming scaling challenges facing electrical switches in data-center networks with the slowdown of Moore’s Law and the exponential increase in network demands posed by emerging cloud workloads. Wavelength switching based on tunable lasers and passive arrayed waveguide grating routers is a particularly promising technology for optical switching due to its amenability to fast switching and the passive nature of the core, which leads to lower power consumption and higher fault tolerance. We investigated the potential of this technology in the context of Sirius, a scalable, optically-switched network architecture for data centers, which can achieve ultra-fast switching time. At its core lies a novel tunable laser that can tune across wavelengths in less than 930 ps. The laser uses a disaggregated architecture where the carrier generation is separated from the wavelength tuning, which significantly reduces the wavelength tuning time compared to conventional tunable lasers. In this paper, we describe the different instantiations of this architecture that we developed and present the experimental evaluation.
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