Demonstration of an all-optical switch by use of a multiwavelength mutual injection-locked laser diode

Abstract

Error-free all-optical packet switching is demonstrated by use of a multiwavelength mutual injection-locked Fabry-Perot laser diode. A 10-Gbit/s data signal is switched on and off with an extinction ratio of 16.9 dB when an optical control signal is turned off and on with a power difference of only 3 dB.

Nonlinear Photonic Signal Processing Subsystems and Applications

“…Although the injection locking of semiconductor laser has been studied for two decades, new aspects and applications have only become apparent with recent advances in fiber optic technology. Recently, injection locked lasers have been used for different kinds of nonlinear photonic signal processing, including signal regeneration (Weich et al, 1994, Kakagawa et al, 2001, Inoue & Oda, 1995, Yamashita & Suzuki, 2004, Kuramoto & Yamashita, 2003, optical repolarization , optical packet demultiplexing (Chan et al, 2003), modulation format conversion , Chang et al, 2004). Injection locking also shows promising applications in optical packet switched networks , Cable-TV networks , passive optical networks (PONs) ) and radioover-fiber (ROF) networks (Lu et al, 2008).…”

All-optical header processing using an injection-locked Fabry-Pérot laser diode

“…Figure 6 depicts the spectrum of the multiwavelength injection-locked FP-LD. The output of the proposed header processor can be injected into the all-optical switch, as demonstrated in [6], in order to switch the data packet.…”

“…The header processing is achieved using a special control packet by which the outcome of the optical processing of one bit in the data-packet header will switch the entire control packet ON or OFF. The switched control packets' output can then be used to switch the data packets ON or OFF, for example, again using multiwavelength mutual injectionlocking in a FP-LD, as described [6].…”

All-optical packet switching with all-optical header processing using Fabry-Perot laser diodes

“…The control signal therefore injection-locks the FP-LD at wavelength λ c and maintains injection locking until the end of the control signal. Injection locking at wavelength λ c will induce a red-shift of the FP-LD mode comb which in turn will suppress the gain of the data packet at wavelength λ d [36,37]. The output of the FP-LD at wavelength λ c will be high as demonstrated in Section 3.2 and 3.3 but the output at wavelength λ d will also be low.…”