Patterning effect mitigation using complementary data for NRZ wavelength conversion with a SOA-MZI

A novel scheme of Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ) all-optical wavelength conversion is proposed using a semiconductor optical amplifier based Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI), where the complementary NRZ data is used to mitigate SOA patterning effect. The performances of the wavelength converters are numerically evaluated in terms of the waveform, eye-diagram and Q factor of the output signals at 40 Gb/s, using a time-domain SOA model. It is shown that the new complementary scheme significantly improves the Q factor of the converted signal from 3.8 to 8.1, compared with the traditional scheme.