Demonstration of time division demultiplexing from 40Gb/s to 10Gb/s via polarisation switching in a semiconductor optical amplifier

Abstract

There has been much recent interest in the use of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) as ultrafast (40Gb/s and higher) nonlinear switching elements. In particular, SOAs have been employed as wavelength conversion devices for use in wavelength division multiplexing networks and as optical time division de/multiplexing (OTDM) elements such as that reported by Patrick et. al [1]. Here we demonstrate for the first time we believe, a polarisation switching technique in which a 40Gb/s OTDM signal is optically gated by a 10GHz pulse train, affording high extinction ratio, error free demultiplexing from 40Gb/s to 10Gb/s.