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A detailed experimental investigation of the effects of external optical injection on a Fabry Perot laser when in continuous wave (CW) mode and in gain switched mode is presented. Such detailed characterisation can help in optimising operating condition of the transmitters to significantly improve the system performance for dedicated applications. In CW mode, we characterised various performance indicators of a laser such as side mode suppression ratio (SMSR), wavelength, peak power, modulation bandwidth, resonance frequency, optical linewidth, and phase noise under external optical injection with the use of tuning maps. We also present in brief the theoretical origin of these parameters using rate equations. We then investigated the performance of the externally injected Fabry Perot laser under gain switching for optical frequency comb (OFC) generation. We demonstrated the generation of an OFC with a free spectral range of 6.25 GHz to 25 GHz and a quasi-continuous wavelength tunability of 31 nm. The phase noise of the tones of the generated OFC is measured and is found to be similar to that of the externally injected light and the measured optical linewidth was ∼40 kHz. We also presented experimentally the trade-off that exists between bandwidth of the generated OFC and the phase noise of individual comb tones under external optical injection and their optimisation for the application at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a hybrid integration platform based on the combination of passive and electro-optic polymers. We analyze the optical and physical compatibility of these materials and describe the advantages that our hybrid platform is expected to have for the development of transmitters in terms of operation flexibility and speed. We combine our platform with InP electronics and develop a transmitter with 22-nm tunability in the C-band and potential for serial non-return-to-zero on-off-keying operation directly at 100 Gb/s. We investigate its transmission performance at 80 and 100 Gb/s using dispersion uncompensated standard single-mode fiber and demonstrate bit-error rate (BER) lower than 10−10 at 80 Gb/s after 1625 m, lower than 10−10 at 100 Gb/s after 500 m, lower than 10−9 at 100 Gb/s after 1000 m, and BER 10−7 at the same rate after 1625 m. We also employ the transmitter inside an experimental setup, which aims to emulate an optical circuit switched (OCS) domain of an intradata center network, and demonstrate at 100 Gb/s the way, in which its wavelength tunability can resolve contentions and improve the flexibility and the efficiency of the network. Finally, we outline our next plans, including the development of flexible and ultra-fast transmitters for coherent systems using the same polymer-to-polymer integration platform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On-chip 1-D photonic crystal nanocavities were designed and fabricated in a 300 mm silicon-on-insulator wafer using a CMOS-compatible process with 193 nm immersion lithography and silicon oxide planarization. High quality factors up to 105 were achieved. By changing geometrical parameters of the cavities, we also demonstrated a wide range of wavelength tunability for the cavity mode, a low insertion loss and excellent agreement with simulation results. These on-chip nanocavities with high quality factors and low modal volume, fabricated through a high-resolution and high-volume CMOS compatible platform open up new opportunities for the photonic integration community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

640 Gb/s all-optical ON-OFF keying signal regeneration based on nonlinearities in a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide is demonstrated and characterized. The data are transferred from the distorted original optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) signal onto a high quality and locally generated 640 GHz clock by pump depletion simultaneously operating a wavelength conversion. The thresholding behavior and the saturation effect of pump depletion in the PPLN waveguide for low and high pump power values, respectively, allow for a noise compression on the wavelength-converted replica of the original signal. The use of a stable clock with a shorter pulsewidth also allows for a sort of sampling of the original OTDM frame in the bit time center, resulting in a pulse reshaping that eliminates all noise contributions on the pulse tails. This operation produces a reduction of the original time jitter of the signal. The sampling operation also results in a compression of the new OTDM frame pulses compensating for the residual chromatic dispersion effects. After having characterized the transfer function of the proposed regeneration scheme, we evaluate its effectiveness as a function of optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR), pulse broadening, and time jitter of the input signal. Regeneration performance is measured in terms of bit error rate (BER) and power penalty @ BER = 10-9. Error-free operation can be recovered and maintained over an input signal OSNR range of 8 dB. This results in a BER improvement up to several orders of magnitude, obtained when the input OSNR is reduced by 20 dB with respect to the baseline. The time jitter of input signals with original jitter values from 100 to 300 fs has been reduced of nearly one order of magnitude to values lower than 40 fs. We also demonstrate that a pulse broadening up to 20% of the original pulsewidth can be compensated. Finally, wavelength tunability of the regenerator input and output signal can be, in principle, guaranteed over the whole C-band and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current status of fiber based optical parametric oscillators is presented with a focus on pulsed systems employing microstructure fibers. It is shown based on standard expressions for parametric processes in optical fibers that systems employing short (less than a few cm) optical fibers lead to superior performance in terms of wavelength tunability and output power. Practical guidelines for realizing a working system are given. These devices are now practical as ultrafast pulsed-light sources and for extending the wavelengths of operation of existing mode-locked fiber lasers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We demonstrate group velocity dispersion (GVD) and dispersion slope (DS) compensation devices based on enhanced thermal chirping of glued fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). By gluing a uniform FBG onto a uniform Zn channel for the GVD compensator and a linearly tapered Zn channel for the DS compensator, the thermal sensitivity of the FBG is enhanced. The thermal chirping of the FBG is given by the thermal expansion of a Zn channel, the thermooptic effect, and the thermal expansion of the optical fiber. Controlling the temperature distributions of the uniform FBG performs the tuning of GVD and/or DS, as well as their center wavelengths. These compensation devices can tune their GVD or DS while maintaining a constant center wavelength and change their center wavelengths while preserving constant GVD or DS values. The GVD can be tuned from -123.39 to -57.29 ps/nm with the center wavelength at 1552.9 nm, while the center wavelength can be shifted 2.2 nm with a GVD value of about -105 ps/nm. On the other hand, the DS can be tuned from -8.88 to -24.44 ps/nm2 with the center wavelength at 1554.5 nm, while the center wavelength can be shifted 0.6 nm with a DS value of about -10.4 ps/nm2. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

All-optical wavelength conversion and multicasting with input and output wavelength tunability is a desired component for reconfigurable wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks for improving the efficiency and performance. In this paper, we propose a novel tunable all-optical wavelength-conversion-and-wavelength-multicasting schemes by using orthogonally polarized nondegenerate four-wave mixing (FWM) in highly nonlinear fiber. The input signal is amplified and serves as one of the two pumps. Wide tunability is obtained by placing a dummy pump and dummy signals at appropriate wavelengths with respect to the input wavelength and desired output wavelengths. For a 10-Gb/s NRZ system, 1:3 multicasting is demonstrated with a less than 0.6-dB power penalty, over a 25-nm tuning range for both input and output signals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three existing wavelength monitor integrated laser module designs are evaluated. The shortcomings of these designs are resolved by a unique design that eases alignment tasks and greatly enhances the wavelength stability and the wavelength tunability. For example, the wavelength drift over case temperature is 16 times smaller than the best result of previous reports. With the incorporation of thermal compensation, the temperature-induced wavelength drift of the etalon is eliminated. In anticipation, this design enables a worst overall wavelength-drift of 4.41 pm after 25 years of usage to be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For a wavelength division multiaccess (WDMA) system, the reservation (R-WDMA) and the preallocation (P-WDMA) protocols are two major media access methods to support packet-switched traffic. In this paper, a new media access control (MAC) protocol, accelerative preallocation WDMA (AP-WDMA), is proposed to overcome the disadvantages of P-WDMA and retain its advantages. AP-WDMA relieves the technology constraints by restricting the wavelength tunability at only one end of the communication link, removes the channel and station status tables required by R-WDMA, and uses simple arithmetics to allocate channels. Although it uses a dedicated control channel to send control-acknowledge packets, AP-WDMA employs a network management mechanism to make full use of idle time slots under different propagation and tuning delays. In addition, it is well suited to wavelength-limited networks. Three heuristic methods for channel sharing, interleaved (I), neighborhood (N), and weighted-balanced (WBH), are evaluated. Through analytical evaluations, AP-WDMA is shown to be able to improve the channel utilization and system throughput much more significantly than I-TDMA*, which is a P-WDMA protocol. We also evaluate the impact on the performance of AP-WDMA by the number of channels, the four traffic types (mesh, disconnected, ring, and uniform), the degree of channel sharing, and the unbalanced load among channels. The results show that the utilization is scalable in terms of the number of channels. Furthermore, the utilization of channels is best for the ring-traffic type and worst for the disconnected-traffic type, and the system throughput decreases as the degree of channel sharing increases. Finally, using heuristics I or WBH instead of N can resolve the unbalanced load problem under various traffic types and degrees of channel sharing [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The wavelength tunability and the polarization characteristics of twisted polarization beamsplitting fiber couplers are investigated experimentally and analyzed theoretically. The measured spectrum transmissions and polarization characteristics agree well with the theoretical results. The wavelength working as a polarization beamsplitter can be tuned in the 1.3-1.75 μm wavelength range without significant degradation. Splitting ratios for orthogonally polarized light are more than 20 dB and less than -20 dB [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]