200-Gb/s wavelength conversion using a delayed-interference all-optical semiconductor gate assisted by nonlinear polarization rotation

Abstract The pattern-induced intensity fluctuation (PIF) of output signals with a bit-rate above 160 Gb/s has been one of the major issues regarding all-optical semiconductor gates. We have demonstrated that the nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) in the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) plays a significant role in the high-frequency operation of a delayed-interference signal-wavelength converter (DISC). We did this using a cross-correlation system whose temporal resolution is 1.5 ps which was developed to monitor our 200-Gb/s, 4992-bit-long binary-patterned waveforms. When we experimentally optimized the NPR effect inside our DISC specially for our 200-Gb/s wavelength conversion, the PIF was significantly improved (from 5.0 to 1.5, for example). Our systematically measured dependence of the PIF on the polarization settings was qualitatively explained with the new gate model that we developed earlier in this work.