Krawczak, J. A. | Search NASA

NASA NTRS1984

Magneto-optic garnet and liquid crystal optical switches

Magnetic stripe domain and liquid crystal devices are being developed and evaluated as fiber optic switches that can be utilized for nonblocking type nxm optical matrix switches in networking and optical processing. Liquid crystal switches are characterized by very low insertion loss and crosstalk, while stripe domain switches commutate in less than one microsecond. Both switches operate on multimode, randomly polarized fiber light with potentially large values for (n,m). The applications of these magnetic stripe domain and liquid crystal devices are discussed.

Krawczak, J. A.↗

NASA NTRS1979

Multilayer self-structured bubble memories

Research work on multilayer self-structured bubble memories is at an early stage. The coupling of bubbles to stripes is investigated theoretically and experimentally and shown to be adequate for propagation. Propagation of stripes is demonstrated both by current access and field access techniques. These propagation techniques are of prime interest because they can eliminate most photographic features from the storage area. Multilayer films offer great promise for higher-capacity higher-density memories in which most of the photolithography has been eliminated and the minimum feature size of much of the remaining has been increased. Furthermore, stripe propagation can be carried out with current access, providing a significant reduction in packaging cost and power consumption over field access devices.

Kamin, M.↗