Performance of a reconfigurable wavelength converter based on dual-pump-wave mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier

We report on a wavelength converter based on dual pump wave mixing in an 1-mm-long bulk semiconductor optical amplifier. Very high conversion efficiency (more than 0 dB) and signal-to-background-noise ratio (SBR) (16 dB), for large down- or up-wavelength shifts (30 mn) has been achieved using parallel polarized pumps with low optical power (-13 dBm). Orthogonal polarized pumps result in worse performance, having the advantage of polarization insensitivity for small wavelength spacing between them. The converter operates in a fixed input-tunable output or a tunable input-fixed output mode of operation. In each mode, the measured SBR is almost independent of the wavelength shift for either up- or down-conversion.