Time- and wavelength-interleaved laser pulses: prospects and challenges in optical signal processing

We review our recent work on the generation of time- and wavelength-interleaved laser pulses and their applications in optical signal processing. Using phase and amplitude modulation on four continuous-wave lasers at ~1550 nm followed by chirp compensation, we have generated <;6 ps pulses switched sequentially among 4 center wavelengths with a repetition rate of 80 GHz. The pulses are nearly transform limited with a time-bandwidth product ~ 0.464. We applied time- and wavelength-interleaved pulses for new applications in nonlinear processing of communication signals. Four-wavelength DPSK multicasting with simultaneous NRZ-to-RZ pulse format conversion has been achieved with four-wave mixing. In addition, using optical parametric amplification with the interleaved pulses, we have demonstrated reconfigurable 40 Gb/s OTDM demultiplexing, as well as amplitude noise reduction in DPSK wavelength multicast.