Abstract
All-optical technologies can alleviate requirements on electronic and optoelectronic devices in transmission systems and in switching networks. The use of nonlinear refraction in silica fibers has recently been used to demonstrate long-distance1’2 and highspeed3 soliton transmission as well as high-speed all-optical switching and logic.4,5 Soliton pulses adiabatically compensate the fiber dispersion, which permits high transmission capacities. Other techniques for compensating fiber dispersion (nonadiabatically) include prechirping6 and the use of special fiber whose dispersion has the sign opposite of that of the transmission fiber.7 These schemes, however, must be designed for a limited system length and need signal levels to be low so that linear propagation of the data is maintained, which cannot always be guaranteed. Three all-optical techniques for switching high-speed data have been demonstrated. In the soliton dragging gate8 the timing of the data pulses is controlled by a gating pulse. In the nonlinear-optical-loop mirror (NOLM)9 the phase of the data pulses is changed by the gating pulse. Finally, in the four-wave-mixing (FWM) demultiplexer10 the gating pulses create new wavelength components containing the demultiplexed data.
© 1993 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
Peter A. Andrekson
TUB1 Optical Amplifiers and Their Applications (OAA) 1993
Masataka Nakazawa
WC1 Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 1993
K. Uchiyama, H. Takara, S. Kawanishi, T. Morioka, T. Kitoh, and M. Saruwatari
TUB2 Optical Amplifiers and Their Applications (OAA) 1993