Abstract
Ultrafast optical gates (or switches) will play an important role in future optical communication systems with high bit-rate TDM channels. To date, all-optical switches, such as a nonlinear loop mirrors (NOLMs) and the semiconductor optical amplifier-based symmetric Mach-Zehnder (SOA-MZ), have been proposed, and their de-multiplexing (DEMUX) operations are demonstrated at data rates of over 100 Gbit/s.1,2 On the other hand, electro-optic (EO) switches are advantageous over these all-optical ones in terms of simplicity of operation. It has been generally difficult to achieve ultrafast EO-switching, because the bandwidths of driver amplifiers and electrical interconnections limit the bandwidth of the EO-switch. To overcome these problems, we have proposed a monolithic optical gate configured of a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode (UTC-PD)3 and a traveling wave electroabsorption modulator (TW-EAM)4 in which the PD output signal directly drives the TW-EAM without electrical amplifiers (monolithic PD-EAM).5 We have demonstrated that a fabricated PD-EAM has a very short gate opening of 2.3 ps.5 An optical RZ pulse gating corresponding to a 200-Gbit/s data rate has also been achieved.6 In this paper, we report error-free DEMUX operation of a newly designed PD-EAM at a data rate of up to 160 Gbit/s.
© 2002 Optical Society of America
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