Optical bridges for fiber optic local area networks

The author discusses the problem of designing high-speed fiber-optic LANs. A brief description of the architecture of a bridge is given, and its conceptual design is provided. Optical logic gates, which are the basic elements in designing optical digital circuits, are introduced. The design of an all-optical storage device, which is the basic component of the buffering system in a bridge, is shown. The design and operation of electronic shift registers and optical shift registers are explained. These optical shift registers constitute the whole buffering system in a bridge. The implementation of an optical lookup table needed for packet processing in a bridge is provided.<>