Quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) formats are deployed in inter-data center networks where high transmission capacity and spectral efficiency are required. However, in intra-data center networks, a four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) format is deployed to satisfy the requirements for a simple and low-cost transceiver configuration. For the seamless and effective connection of such heterogeneous networks without an optical-electrical-optical conversion, an all-optical modulation format conversion technique is required. In this paper, we propose all-optical PAM4 to QPSK and 16QAM modulation format conversions using silicon-rich nitride waveguides. The successful conversions from 50-Gbps-class PAM4 signals to 50-Gbps-class QPSK and 100-Gbps-class 16QAM signals are demonstrated via numerical simulations.

Optical phase conjugation (OPC) is an all-optical signal processing technique for mitigating fiber nonlinearity and is promising for building cost-efficient fiber networks with few optic-electric-optic conversions and long amplification spacing. In lumped amplified systems, OPC has a little nonlinearity mitigation efficiency for nonlinear distortion induced by cross-phase modulation (XPM) due to the asymmetry of power and chromatic dispersion (CD) maps during propagation in transmission fiber. In addition, the walk-off of XPM-induced noise becomes small due to the CD compensation effect of OPC, so the deterministic nonlinear distortion increases. Therefore, lumped amplified transmission systems with OPC are more sensitive to channel spacing than conventional systems. In this paper, we show the channel spacing dependence of NZ-DSF transmission using amplification repeater with OPC. Numerical simulations show comprehensive characteristics between channel spacing and CD in a 100-Gbps/λ WDM signal. An experimental verification using periodically poled LiNbO3-based OPC is also performed. These results suggest that channel spacing design is more important in OPC-assisted systems than in conventional dispersion-unmanaged systems.

In inter-data center networks where high transmission capacity and spectral efficiency are required, a 16QAM format is deployed. On the other hand, in intra-data center networks, a PAM4 format is deployed to meet the demand for a simple and low-cost transceiver configuration. For a seamless and effective connection of such heterogeneous networks without using optical-electrical-optical conversion, an all-optical modulation format conversion technique is required. In this paper, we propose an all-optical PAM4 to 16QAM modulation format conversion using nonlinear optical loop mirror. The successful conversion operation from 2 × 26.6-Gbaud PAM4 signals to a 100-Gbps class 16QAM signal is verified by numerical simulation. Compared with an ideal 16QAM signal, the power penalty of the converted 16QAM signal can be kept within 0.51dB.

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) scheme is used widely in photonic metro-core networks. In a WDM network, wavelength continuity constraint is employed to simply construct relay nodes. This constraint reduces the wavelength usage efficiency of each link. To improve the same, an all-optical wavelength converter (AO-WC) has been attracting attention in recent years. In particular, an AO-WC is a key device because it enables simultaneous conversion of multiple wavelengths of signal lights to other wavelengths, independent of the modulation format. However, each AO-WC requires installation of multiple laser sources with narrow bandwidth because the lights emitted by the laser sources are used as pump lights when the wavelengths of the signal lights are converted by the four-wave mixing (FWM) process. To reduce the number of laser sources, we propose a remote pumped AO-WC, in which the laser sources of the pump lights are aggregated into several relay nodes. When the request for the wavelength conversion from the relay node without the laser source is conveyed, the relay node with the laser source transmits the pump light through the optical link. The proposed scheme enables reduction in the number of laser sources of the pump lights. Herein we analyze the distortion of the pump light by propagating it through the optical link We also evaluate the effect of the noise in optical amplifiers and nonlinearities in optical fibers using numerical simulations employing the representative parameters for a practical WDM network.

We developed a polarization-independent and reserved-band-less complementary spectral inverted optical phase conjugation (CSI-OPC) device using dual-band difference frequency generation based on highly efficient periodically poled LiNbO3 waveguide technologies. To examine the nonlinearity mitigation in a long-haul transmission using a large number of OPCs, we installed a CSI-OPC device in the middle of a pure silica core fiber-based recirculating loop transmission line with a length of 320km. First, we examined the fiber-input power tolerance after 5,120-km and 6,400-km transmission using 22.5-Gbaud PDM-16QAM 10-channel DWDM signals and found a Q-factor improvement of over 1.3dB along with enhanced power tolerance thanks to mitigating the fiber nonlinearity. We then demonstrated transmission distance extension using the CSI-OPC device. The use of multiple CSI-OPCs enables an obvious performance improvements attained by extending the transmission distance from 6,400km to 8,960km, which corresponds to applying the CSI-OPC device 28 times. Moreover, there was no Q-factor degradation for the link in a linear regime after applying the CSI-OPC device more than 16 times. These results demonstrate that the CSI-OPC device can improve the nonlinear tolerance of PDM-16QAM signals without an excess penalty.

A number of all-optical signal processing schemes based on nonlinear optical effects have been proposed and demonstrated for use in future photonic networks. Since various modulation formats have been developed for optical communication systems, all-optical converters between different modulation formats will be a key technology to connect networks transparently and efficiently. This paper reviews our recent works on all-optical modulation format conversion technologies in order to highlight the fundamental principles and applications in variety of all-optical signal processing schemes.

We propose and demonstrate a method that can demultiplex an optical OFDM signal with various capacity based on time lens-based optical Fourier transform. The proposed tunable optical OFDM signal demultiplexer is composed of a phase modulator and a tunable chromatic dispersion emulator. The spectrum of the variable capacity OFDM signal is transformed into Nyquist time-division multiplexing pulses with the optical Fourier transform, and the OFDM sub-carrier channels are dumultiplexed in the time-domain. We also propose a simple method for approximating and generating quadratic waveform to drive the phase modulator. After explaining the operating principle of the method and the design of some parameters in detail, we show successful demultiplexing of 4×8 and 4×10 Gbit/s optical OFDM signals with our proposed method as the preliminary investigation results.

We numerically and experimentally demonstrate for the first time a novel all-optical quantization technique using dense spectral slicing with a specially designed arrayed waveguide grating for orthogonal frequency division multiplexed signals. By using a mode-locked laser diode with low jitter, the quantization technique can be achieved a high-speed and low-jitter operation. Both numerical and experimental results confirm the feasibility of 10 GSample/s, completely linear 3-bit step quantization for photonic analog to digital conversion. This optical quantization technique will be beneficial for ultra-high-speed optical communication using digital signal processing.

We experimentally investigate the performance of a distributed Raman amplifier (DRA)-based pulse compressor for a phase modulated signal. A 10 Gb/s return-to-zero (RZ)-differential phase shift keying (DPSK) signal is compressed to picosecond range after transmission. Pulsewidth is continuously compressed in a wide range from 20 to 3.2 ps by changing the pump power of the DRA while the compressed waveforms are well-matched with sech2 function. Error-free operations at bit-error-rate (BER) of 10-9 are achieved for the compressed signals of various pulsewidths with low power penalties within 2.3 dB compared to the back-to-back. After the compression, the 10 Gb/s signal is used to generate a 40 Gb/s RZ-DPSK optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) signal. This 40 Gb/s OTDM signal is then successfully demultiplexed to 10 Gb/s DPSK signal by using an optical gate based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF).

In all-optical switches using the cascade of second harmonic generation and difference frequency mixing in periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide devices, walk-off between the fundamental and second harmonic pulses causes crosstalk between neighboring symbols, and limits the switching performance. In this paper, we numerically study retiming characteristics of all-optical switches that employ the PPLN waveguide devices with consideration for the effects of the crosstalk and for the input timing of the data and clock pulses. We find that the time offset between the data and clock pulses can control the timing jitter of the switched output; an appropriate offset can reduce the jitter while improving the switching efficiency.

High gain extinction ratio and stable control of the phase in phase sensitive amplification are fundamental to realize either phase regeneration or quadrature squeezing of phase modulated signals in an efficient and robust manner. In this paper, we show that a combination of our previously demonstrated “sideband-assisted” dual-pump phase sensitive amplifier with a gain extinction ratio of more than 25dB, and a phase-locked loop based stabilization technique, enable efficient QPSK quadrature squeezing. Its stable operation is exploited to realize phase de-multiplexing of QPSK signals into BPSK tributaries. The phase de-multiplexed signals are evaluated through measurement of constellation diagrams, eye diagrams and more importantly, BER curves. The de-multiplexed BPSK signals exhibited an OSNR penalty of less than 1dB compared to the back-to-back BPSK signals.

We investigate a quantization error improvement technique using a dual rail configuration for optical quantization. Our proposed optical quantization uses intensity-to-wavelength conversion based on soliton self-frequency shift and spectral compression based on self-phase modulation. However, some unfavorable input peak power regions exist due to stagnations of wavelength shift or distortions of spectral compression. These phenomena could induce a serious quantization error and degrade the effective number of bit (ENOB). In this work, we propose a quantization error improvement technique which can make up for the unfavorable input peak power regions. We experimentally verify the quantization error improvement effect by the proposed technique in 6 bit optical quantization. The estimated ENOB is improved from 5.35 bit to 5.66 bit. In addition, we examine the XPM influence between counter-propagating pulses at high sampling rate. Experimental results and numerical simulation show that the XPM influence is negligible under ∼40 GS/s conditions.

All-optical 1-to-6 wavelength multicasting of a 10-Gb/s picosecond-tunable-width converted return-to-zero (RZ)-on-off-keying (OOK) data signal using a wideband-parametric pulse source from a distributed Raman amplifier (DRA) is experimentally demonstrated. Width-tunable wavelength multicasting within the C-band with approximately 40.6-nm of separation with various compressed RZ data signal inputs have been proposed and demonstrated. The converted multicast pulse widths can be flexibly controlled down to 2.67 ps by tuning the Raman pump powers of the DRA. Nearly equal pulse widths at all multicast wavelengths are obtained. Furthermore, wide open eye patterns and penalties less than 1.2 dB at the 10-9 bit-error-rate (BER) level are found.

A combination of nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ)-to-return-to-zero (RZ) waveform conversion and wavelength multicasting with pulsewidth tunability is experimentally demonstrated. A NRZ data signal is injected into a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF)-based four-wave mixing (FWM) switch with four RZ clocks compressed by a Raman amplification-based multiwavelength pulse compressor (RA-MPC). The NRZ signal is multicast and converted to RZ signals in a continuously wide pulsewidth tuning range between around 12.17 and 4.68 ps by changing the Raman pump power of the RA-MPC. Error-free operations of the converted RZ signals with different pulsewidths are achieved with negative power penalties compared with the back-to-back NRZ signal and the small variation among received powers of RZ output channels at a bit-error-rate (BER) of 10-9. The NRZ-to-RZ waveform conversion and wavelength multicasting without using the RA-MPC are also successfully implemented.

We investigate resolution improvement in optical quantization with keeping high sampling rate performance in optical sampling. Since our optical quantization approach uses power-to-wavelength conversion based on soliton self-frequency shift, a spectral compression can improve resolution in exchange for sampling rate degradation. In this work, we propose a different approach for resolution improvement by parallel use of dispersion devices so as to avoid sampling rate degradation. Additional use of different dispersion devices can assist the wavelength separation ability of an original dispersion device. We demonstrate the principle of resolution improvement in 3 bit optical quantization. Simulation results based on experimental evaluation of 3 bit optical quantization system shows 4 bit optical quantization is achieved by parallel use of dispersion devices in 3 bit optical quantization system. The maximum differential non-linearity (DNL) and integral non-linearity (INL) are 0.49 least significant bit (LSB) and 0.50 LSB, respectively. The effective number of bits (ENOB) estimated to 3.62 bit.

We report a 40-Gb/s and highly accurate intensity limiter with a single Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) for low-power-consumption driving intensity limiting. The intensity limiter based on self-phase modulation with an appropriate pre-chirping procedure makes it possible, which provides a highly accurate limiting of less than 0.01 dB. We fed 40-Gb/s signals with 2.69 dB intensity fluctuation and 4.7 dB improvement on the receiver sensitivity was obtained for a bit error rate of 10-9 by using a numerical simulation.

We demonstrate an all-optical picosecond pulse duration-tunable nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ)-to-return-to-zero (RZ) data format conversion using a Raman amplifier-based compressor and a fiber-based four-wave mixing (FWM) switch. A NRZ data signal is injected into the fiber-based FWM switch (AND gate) with a compressed RZ clock by the Raman amplifier-based compressor, and convert to RZ data signal by the fiber-based FWM switch. The compressed RZ clock train acts as a pump signal in the fiber-based FWM switch to perform the NRZ-to-RZ data format conversion. By changing the Raman pump power of the Raman amplifier-based compressor, it is possible to tune the pulse duration of the converted RZ data signal from 15 ps to 2 ps. In all the tuning range, the receiver sensitivity at bit error rate (BER) of 10-9 for the converted RZ data signal was about 1.31.7 dB better than the receiver sensitivity of the input NRZ data signal. Moreover, the pulse pedestal of the converted RZ data signals is well suppressed owing to the FWM process in the fiber-based FWM switch.

Optical buffer memory for 10-Gb/s data signal is demonstrated experimentally using a polarization bistable vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). The optical buffer memory is based on an optical AND gate function and the polarization bistability of the VCSEL. Fast AND gate operation responsive to 50-ps-width optical pulses is achieved experimentally by increasing the detuning frequency between an injection light into the VCSEL and a lasing light from the VCSEL. A specified bit is extracted from the 10-Gb/s data signal by the fast AND gate operation and is stored as the polarization state of the VCSEL by the polarization bistability. The corresponding numerical simulations are also performed using two-mode rate equations taking into account the detuning frequency. The simulation results confirm the fast AND gate operation by increasing the detuning frequency as well as the experimental results.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate an all-optical broadband wavelength conversion scheme with simultaneous power amplification based on a pump-modulated fiber optic parametric amplifier (FOPA). All-optical tunable wavelength conversion from one to two wavelengths was achieved with ≥13 dB extinction ratio and <2.7-dB power penalty, accompanied by a high (≥37 dB) and flat ( 3 dB variation) FOPA gain spectrum over 47 nm.

Performance analysis of ultra-fast all-optical analog-to-digital converter using optical multiple-level thresholding module based on self-frequency shift in fiber is described. In analog-to-digital conversion, the purposes of optical sampling and optical quantization are in the possibility of the speed-up of sampling and quantization processes using various ultra-fast nonlinear phenomena depending on an intensity of a light. The result of analysis indicates that the number of achievable quantized levels of the proposed approach is in the increasing tendency with an increase in the peak power of an input pulse.