Abstract

Recent patents and progress on all-optical wavelength converters (WCs) based on semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are reviewed. Differential schemes utilizing the nonlinear optical effects of SOAs in the configurations such as the Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), the delayed-interference signal-wavelength converter (DISC), detuned narrow filter and novel turbo-switch structure are discussed and compared, which overcome the limitation of operation speed of WCs due to the SOA recovery time(~100 ps). It is shown that, by using the chirp effect or turbo-switch schemes, the WCs can be operated at the range of 160-320Gb/s, which will be good candidates for the applications in the next generation all-optical fiber networks.

Keywords: Cross-gain modulation, cross-phase modulation, four-wave mixing, semiconductor optical amplifiers, Wavelength converter, polarization multiplexing signals, noise bandwidth., monolithic integration