All-optical 3R regeneration and wavelength conversion in an integrated SOA/DFB laser: experiment and simulation

Summary form only. The regeneration of data signals is a requirement of future WDM networking schemes. As data streams propagate through a network, they inevitably suffers degradation, chiefly through chromatic dispersion and accumulated noise from erbium doped fibre amplifiers. Some form of regeneration is thus required to combat this degradation. Indeed all-optical 3R (retiming, reshaping and re-amplifying) regeneration has previously been demonstrated in optical loop mirrors and other interferometric arrangements. Here however, we demonstrate for the first time simultaneous all optical 3R regeneration and format conversion in a single, simple integrated device consisting of a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) monolithically integrated with a distributed feedback (DFB) laser. A data signal transmitted down 101 km of standard fibre is regenerated all-optically in this laser/amplifier device by gain saturation, converting the data from an NRZ to RZ format. The highly nonlinear transfer function of the SOA/DFB achieves the reshaping function while gain switching the DFB with an extracted clock achieves the retiming.