Optoelectronic devices for optical chaos communications

We present results on the state of the art in optoelectronic devices for chaos generation and message encryption/extraction. We concentrate on two kind of chaos based emitters and receivers: a semiconductor laser subject to all optical feedback and operating in a non linear regime and a semiconductor laser subject to nonlinear electro optical feedback and operating in a linear regime. We show that both configuration give very good synchronization properties and are suitable for message enconding/decoding at bit rates as high as Gbit/s.