Tb/s all-optical nonlinear switching using semiconductor optical amplifier based Mach-Zehnder interferometer

A new method for increasing speed of all-optical Mach-Zehnder Interferometric (MZI) switching with bulk semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), by use of chirped control signals, is suggested and theoretically analyzed. For 125 fs input and chirped control pulses, we show acceleration of gain recovery process using cross phase modulation (XPM) effect. Our method depicts that Tb/s switching speeds using bulk SOA-MZI with proper Q-factor is feasible. For the first time we reach operation capability at 2Tb/s with a Q-factor more than 10. The new scheme also improves the extinction and amplitude ratio of the output power as well as increases the contrast ratio of the switched signal. We use finite difference beam propagation method for MZI analysis, taking into account all nonlinear effects of SOA such as group velocity dispersion (GVD), Kerr effect, two photon absorption (TPA), carrier heating (CH) and spectral hole burning (SHB).