High-speed bridges for fiber optic local area networks

Progress in optical fiber communications allows ever-increasing channel capacity for local area networks (LANs). However, there are still many problems to solve with respect to bridges interconnecting these LANs, which constitute a system bottleneck. To eliminate the bridge bottleneck in the interconnection of fiber optic LANs, a high-speed bridge using optical technology is proposed. The proposed optical bridge uses bistable optical devices, such as interference filters, as essential components of its design. As these devices can be easily fabricated, the implementation of this optical bridge is feasible.