High-speed optical-wavelength selector handles 32 channels

High-speed optical-wavelength selector handles 32 channels

At this month?s Optical Fiber Communication conference (San Diego, CA), researchers from NTT Opto-electronics Laboratories (Ibaraki-ken, Japan) are scheduled to report on a high-speed, 32-channel optical-wavelength selector (OWS). Such devices are essential to high-speed wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) systems. The NTT device was fabricated with hybrid integration of planar lightwave circuits (PLCs) and high-speed semiconductor-optical-amplifier (SOA) driver circuits on a printed-circuit wiring board. The OWS achieved 10-Gbit/s error-free operation with an insertion loss of 2.3 dB at 1-dBm optical input, crosstalk of ?45 dB, and a high-speed switching operation of less than 1 ns.

Hybrid integration was used to assemble eight four-channel-array, 1.55-?m-spot-size

converter-integrated SOA arrays on a gate PLC. The entire configuration consisted of two arrayed-waveguide-grating PLCs and an SOA-gate PLC. The input arrayed-waveguide grating demultiplexed incoming wavelength-division-multiplexed signals and fed them to the SOA-gate PLC, which gated each of the 32 signal channels prior to multiplexing by the output-side arrayed-waveguide grating. The average 2.3-dB insertion loss was achieved with a standard deviation of 0.85 dB at a gate injection current of 70 mA, and the polarization-dependent loss of each channel was less than 1 dB. Contact Fumihiro Ebisawa at [email protected].