TY - JOUR IS - 18 EP - 32467 SN - 1094-4087 TI - Switching in microseconds: design of a 5 × 5 non-blocking free space optical switch at 1550nm with a piezo-actuator and beam-steering lens system AV - public N1 - Published by Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. N2 - Modern data center networks (DCNs) require optical switches with ultra-low loss, ultra-fast reconfiguration speed, high throughput, and high extinction ratio performances. In this work, we propose the design of a 5 × 5 optical switch at 1550 nm based on a piezo-actuator serving as a translating input optical source, and a beam-steering system built of spherical lenses to complete the switching behaviour. An ultra-fast actuator switching speed is estimated as 1.55 µs latency for a single connection with a demo circuit. We further simulate the beam-steering system end-to-end in a commercial optical design software CODE V and demonstrate a theoretical 2.16 dB insertion loss for a single connection in the switch at optimum alignment. ID - discovery10197098 UR - https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.532830 Y1 - 2024/08/26/ A1 - Liu, Y A1 - Odedeyi, T A1 - Zervas, G JF - Optics Express PB - Optica Publishing Group VL - 32 SP - 32448 ER -