Abstract

Optical fibres have brought an enormous benefit to telecommunications through their very low loss and high bandwidth. At present, these benefits are restricted to point to point transmission, the optical pipe. The next major challenge for optical technology is in the switching domain which is currently performed electrically. In this paper we review the properties of non-linear interferometers used for all optical switching. We also describe our recent experiments demonstrating all-optical clock recovery. The combination of our non-linear fibre switching and clock recovery circuits allows the demonstration of more advanced functions including all-optical signal regeneration and memory.

© 1993 Optical Society of America