In communication systems, the need for high bandwidth interconnects and

efficient distribution of large amount of data is very essential. This thesis work

addresses all-optical packet switching issues in the field of reconfigurable optical

interconnection networks for high performance embedded systems. The recent

research conducted at the Halmstad University, on high performance embedded

systems, focuses on the optical interconnection techniques to achieve ultra high

throughputs and reconfigurability at the system level.

Recent research in the field of optical interconnection networks for applications

like switches and routers for data and telecommunication industry and parallel

computing architectures for embedded signal processing use optical to electrical

conversion to switch packets. This conversion scales down the enormous bandwidth

capacity of the optical communication channels to electronic processing rates. To

maintain the high throughputs all over the interconnection networks, the optical

packets need to be maintained in optical state and switched to different part of the

interconnection network. To achieve this goal, all-optical packet switching

architectures are studied. The study is concluded with a positive outlook towards alloptical

switching technologies, and it will play a very important role in the near

future in the field of optical communication, telecommunication and embedded

systems.