Abstract

Spatial or parallel processing of ultrafast optical signals, introduced into ultrahigh-speed optical communication networks, can give the capability for performing various higher-layer functionalities, such as header recognition, signal routing and data encryption.¹ Time-to-space conversion enables parallel processing, which maps the serial time-domain input data packet into its spatial replica, and a space-to-time converter following the parallel processor transforms the processed spatial-domain signal back to the corresponding time-domain data. In this work, we emphasize the time-to-space converter as a step towards the full space-time processing system.

© 2002 Optical Society of America