Experimental Results From A Freespace Beam Steering Crossbar Prototype

AbstractWe give a brief description of a freespace beam steering crossbar switch design using acousto -optic deflectors, and re-port the results of an experiment to accurately measure beam deflection time for the beam width required to support ourdesign. A beam diameter of 1mm to allow reasonable separation of 32 potential targets along an axis was steerable in130 ns to 569 ns, depending on beam proximity to the piezoelectric transducer. All experimental components and instru-mentation used are commercially available. 1.Crossbar descriptionThe problem of designing high packaging density, low latency, high bandwidth processor -memory interconnection net-works is the primary hardware problem facing architects of highly parallel processing systems. The increasing densityand performance of integrated circuits has made powerful processor and large memory chips commodity items, while methods of efficiently interconnecting them do not scale well beyond a few tens of nodes. We present preliminary experimental results from a small -scale prototype of a freespace beam steering crossbar de-