Ishikawa I. (ed.) Ultrafast All-Optical Signal Processing

John Wiley, 2008. — 259 p.This book describes the up-to-date research and development of semiconductor-based, ultrafast, all-optical, signal processing devices for transmission systems in the range of 100 Gb/s to 1 Tb/s. The contents of the book are based on the Tutorial Presentation in ECOC (European Conference on Optical Communications) 2006 at Cannes, France, entitled Ultrafast Devices for OTDM Systems by the present editor. Many researchers in Japan provided their precious materials for the presentation and the editor asked these researchers to be the contributors to this book.
Owing to the recent spread of broadband networks, we can enjoy various services from the network. However, recent rapid increases in communication traffic are causing a serious problem, namely the large power consumption of the network equipment. One possible solution to this problem is to realize ultrafast systems that can transmit a huge amount of data with minimum wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and minimum conversion of optical signals to electric signals. This holds provided low-power-consuming ultrafast signal processing all-optical devices are realized. The motivation for research and development of ultrafast, all-optical, signal processing devices is to construct such low-power consuming ultrafast networks, thus providing high capacity and real-time information communications. Benefits will be, for example, high reality TV conferences, remote presence, entertainments, remote diagnosis and medical treatment based on high resolution real time pictures, and access to the abundant data and computer resources distributed all over the world. Such networks are also indispensable for our economy and production.
So far, extensive research and development have been done to realize all-optical signal processing devices for a bit-rate of 100 Gb/s to 1 Tb/s, both on fiber-based devices and semiconductor-based devices. In this book, however, we focus on the semiconductor-based devices because of their small size and the feasibility of integration with other semiconductor devices for higher functionality. We believe that realization of semiconductor-based devices is a prerequisite for the commercial ultrafast network systems, where criteria are the cost and the size of equipment once required performance is satisfied.
In ultrafast, all-optical devices, optical nonlinearity is used as the operating mechanism. There is an intrinsic trade-off relationship in that a faster all-optical device requires greater optical power for operation. Efforts have been made under this restriction to develop low power consumption ultrafast devices. In this book, we describe light sources, various types of all-optical gate devices, and wavelength converters, where new ideas and concepts are challenged. We also review recent ultrafast transmission experiments to see the trend of system researches, and to consider the further issues to be overcome in such devices to make the ultrafast systems into real ones. The reader will be able to see the up-to-date challenges in developing semiconductor-based, ultrafast all-optical, signal processing devices in this book.Light Sources
Semiconductor Optical Amplifier Based Ultrafast Signal Processing Devices
Uni-traveling-carrier Photodiode (UTC-PD) and PD-EAM Optical Gate Integrating a UTC-PD and a TravelingWave Electro-absorption Modulator
Intersub-band Transition All-Optical Gate Switches
Wavelength Conversion Devices
Summary and Future Prospects