Abstract
Full use of the transmission bandwidth of silica optical fibers will require the use of both the 1300-nm and the 1550-nm low- loss transmission windows. All-optical networks that use both windows may need devices that perform all-optical conversion between 1300-nm signals and 1550-nm signals. Devices previously reported for all-optical 1300-nm to 1550-nm wavelength conversion include split-contact semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs),1 quasi-phase-matched LiNbO3 difference frequency generators (DFGs),2 and nonlinear optical loop mirrors (NOLMs) with alternating dispersion.3 The speed of the split- contact SOA wavelength converter is limited to about 500 Mbit/s by carrier recovery in the SOA's saturable absorption region.1 The DFG technique is bi-directional, fast, and modulation-format independent, but it suffers from low efficiency and high polarization sensitivity. The NOLM technique3 is also bi-directional, but its speed limits and polarization sensitivity are yet to be reported. Here we describe a new all-optical 1300nm to 1550-nm wavelength converter, based on cross-phase modulation (XPM)4 in a 1300-nm SOA. This technique can operate at high speed, with low input power and low polarization sensitivity. We present bit-error-rate (BER) measurements at 1.25 Gbit/s. This is the first reported demonstration of the feasibility of XPM for all-optical 1300-nm to 1550-nm wavelength conversion, and the first reported demonstration of gigabit-per- second all-optical conversion between these wavelengths.
© 1996 Optical Society of America
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