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-distance^1’2 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