All-Optical Gated Wavelength Converter-Eraser Using a Single SOA-MZI

We propose and experimentally demonstrate an original scheme for simultaneous all-optical wavelength conversion and data erasing under an optical gate signal, suitable for on-off keying (OOK) signals. This function is obtained in a semiconductor optical amplifier Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI) exploiting nonlinear interaction between a continuous data stream and an optical gate signal at a different wavelength. In correspondence of the gate signal, a burst of data from the optical stream is converted at the optical gate wavelength and, at the same time, cancelled at the input stream wavelength. Fast switching time enabling selective wavelength shifting on a data stream at 10 Gb/s without any bit loss is demonstrated. Error-free operation with 0.2-dB power penalty for the wavelength-preserved output data and 1.8 dB for the shifted data is reported.