Optical multiplexing of two 21.5 Gb/s DPSK signals into a single 43 Gb/s DQPSK channel with simultaneous 7-fold multicasting in a single PPLN waveguide

We demonstrate optical multiplexing of two 21.5 Gb/s DPSK signals into a single 43 Gb/s RZ-DQPSK channel with simultaneous 7-fold multicasting of the multiplexed 43 Gb/s RZ-DQPSK signal in a single periodically-poled lithium-niobate waveguide. We also demonstrate direct 7-fold multicasting of a single 43 Gb/s RZ-DQPSK signal and give a comparison of the two schemes. A bit error rate of 10^-9 with power penalties < 5 dB was obtained for all multicasted RZ-DQPSK signals with 100 GHz channel spacing.