All-optical Pulse Width And Wavelength Conversion

High-speed transmission systems f i r local-area and wide-area network are currently being investigated. All-optical implementations of these high-speed systems require nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) [1) or semiconductor waveguide [2] demultiplexers. Future systems, exhibiting flexible conversion of signals from high-rate soliton systems to long-haul WDM systems will require alhptical pulse width and wavelength conversion in addition to all-optical demultiplexing. In this paper, we investigate the performance of NOLM's as pulse width and wavelength converters. A NOLM can be configured as a pulse width and wavelength converter by utilizing pulse walk-through of the control and signal pulses in the device. Besides jitter tolerance j31, pulse walk-through allows the narrow control pulse to walk through the wider signal pulse, imposing a nonlinear phase shift across the entire signal pulse. Thus a narrow pulse at one wavelength may be used to switch-out a wider pulse at another wavelength. We investigate experimentally and theoretically, the range of pulse widths and wavelengths that can be used in the NOLM converter. Also, we present 10 Gb/s bitetror-rate @ER) measurements of the performance of the all-optical pulsewidth and wavelength converter.