Bidirectional Injection Operation of SOA-MZI All-Optical Wavelength Converter

Kohsuke NISHIMURA  Masaharu HATTORI  Ryo INOHARA  Masashi USAMI 

Publication
C - Abstracts of IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics (Japanese Edition)  Vol.J90-C  No.4  pp.319-327
Publication Date: 2007/04/01
Online ISSN: 1881-0217
Print ISSN: 1345-2827
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: 
Keyword: 
semiconductor optical amplifier,  cross phase modulation,  cross gain modulation,  Mach-Zehnder interferometer,  bidirectional injection operation, 

Full Text(in Japanese): PDF(949.1KB)

Summary: 
In wavelength converters consisting of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) in Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) configuration that utilizes cross phase modulation (XPM), it is difficult to balance the intensity between each arm of MZI by "standard operation" where data signal is injected into only one of the two SOAs due to cross gain modulation (XGM) induced simultaneously with XPM. Especially for NRZ format wavelength conversion, continuous mark level injection deeply suppresses SOA gain resulting in significant patterning effect in intensity. In this report, bidirectional data injection scheme, in which the dependence of the ratio between XGM and XPM on injection direction of the data pulse is utilized, is proposed to eliminate patterning effect in intensity. The operation principle is experimentally verified and confirmed.