An ultrashort 10-GHz pulse generation scheme was successfully demonstrated using a bulk material InGaAsP electroabsorption modulator to generate the seed pulse. A self-phase modulation-based reshaper was used after the adiabatic soliton compression in a comb-like dispersion profiled fiber. Experiments and simulations confirm that the reshaper effectively removes the pulse pedestal and improves the pulse extinction ratio. As a result, the 10-GHz pulse had no pedestal, a high extinction ratio, and a pulse width of only 1.4 ps.
An all-optical wavelength converter, based on nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) in semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) and array waveguide grating (AWG) filtering, is experimentally demonstrated. The wavelength converter can provide excellent operation including extinction ratio and Q factor. The simultaneous two wavelength conversion outputs are successfully obtained at 20 Gb/s.
A 16×10-Gb/s optical time-division-multiplexing (OTDM) system was demonstrated experimentally with a well-designed ultrashort pulse source based on an electro-absorption modulator (EAM) and nonlinear fiber compressor. The obtained 10-GHz stable and pedestal-free pulse train has 2-ps width, high extinction ratio, and low timing jitter. An ultrafast demultiplexer based on a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) including a commercially available highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) is employed to demultiplex data signal from 160 to 10 Gb/s. A back-to-back error-free demultiplexing experiment is carried out to verify the system performance.