Abstract

Recent increases in demand for transmission capacity and advances in technology have led to increasingly high information rates in fibre systems. As optical systems have migrated to these higher bit-rates, OTDM and WDM systems have been implemented, with EDFAs providing optical amplification. This has led to the need for all-optical regeneration at very high bit-rates (> 10 Gb/s). Interferometric Optical Wavelength Converters (IOWCs) provide wavelength conversion functionality at high bit rates ^[1], and give low chirp and enhanced extinction ratio compared with Cross-Gain wavelength converters. The non-linear transfer characteristics of IOWCs have recently led to interest in them being used as regenerators. In this application an IOWC’s noise performance and its potential for cascading is most important and this paper therefore reports detailed theoretical treatment of these parameters using numerical simulation^[2].

© 1998 IEEE