All-Optical Inverted and Non-Inverted Wavelength Conversion Based on Cross Polarization Modulation in a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier

In this paper, we present the experimental realization of all-optical inverted and non-inverted wavelength conversion based on cross polarization modulation (XPolM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier. The novel and attractive feature in our work is that both all-optical functions can be obtained without changing the set-up configuration. Switching between non-inverted and inverted conversion is done by only adjusting the mean optical power of the pump signal. For both functions, we show that the extinction ratio (ER) of the converted signal can exceed 11 dB in the dynamic configuration at a bit rate of 5 Gbit/s with a NRZ 210-1 PRBS input pump signal.