Broadband Operation of High-Speed All-Optical Gated Wavelength Shifter

We report an extensive experimental wavelength characterization of a scheme for all-optical gated wavelength shifting operation. This scheme is suitable for dynamic wavelength routing and add or drop operation in wavelength-division multiplexing systems and optical packet switched networks. A single semiconductor-optical amplifier Mach–Zehnder interferometer with a multi-inputs configuration is exploited. We demonstrate an error-free operation in the case of 10 Gb/s NRZ-OOK data with moderate power penalties $({< }{\rm 1.7}~{\rm dB})$ over the entire C-band.