Phase-erased wavelength/format conversion and demodulation of 40 Gbit/s DPSK assisted by periodically poled lithium niobate

Abstract

We report a novel phase-erased demodulation of differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) by exploiting cascaded second-harmonic generation and difference-frequency generation (cSHG/DFG) in a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide. Analytical solutions are derived to clearly describe the operation principle. The binary optical phase information carried by the conventional DPSK demodulation outputs is removed thanks to the cSHG/DFG in a PPLN waveguide. PPLN-assisted phase-erased wavelength conversion and demodulation of 40 Gbit/s non-return-to-zero DPSK (NRZ-DPSK), return-to-zero DPSK (RZ-DPSK), and carrier-suppressed return-to-zero DPSK (CSRZ-DPSK) are demonstrated in the experiment. Moreover, the accompanying all-optical format conversions from optical duobinary (ODB) to NRZ and from ODB/alternate-mark inversion (AMI) to RZ are also substantiated in the experiment. In addition, the calculated theoretical results including optical spectra, temporal waveforms, and phase diagrams also confirm the successful implementation of PPLN-assisted 40 Gbit/s NRZ-DPSK/RZ-DPSK/CSRZ-DPSK phase-erased wavelength conversion, demodulation, and ODB-to-NRZ and ODB/AMI-to-RZ format conversions.