Photonic Systems Brown Bag Seminar Series

Thursday, February 22, 2007

11:30  am, RLE Haus Conf. Room 36-428

"Integrated All-Optical Switches for Telecommunication Networks"

Jade Wang

As bandwidth demand in telecommunication networks continues to increase, ultrafast all-optical processing techniques may provide the necessary capacity and efficiency. All-optical techniques can also offer advantages such as format independence, lower power consumption, and reduction of processing latency.  For all-optical techniques to become a reality, however, integrated ultrafast switches are required.  In the seminar, we will discuss the semiconductor optical amplifier Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI), which is an all-optical ultrafast integrated switch.  The SOA-MZI has been previously demonstrated as a demultiplexer at speeds of 160 Gb/s and as an AND gate at speeds of 80 Gb/s.  We demonstrate a straightforward characterization method for determining where to bias these optical gates.  Finally, we describe a system experiment in which a SOA-MZI gate was used as a regenerator for 2-ps pulses over 100,000 km in a recirculating fiber loop with a 0.5 dB penalty.