All-Optical Asynchronous Serial-to-Parallel Converter Circuit for DPSK Optical Packets

We propose a novel asynchronous all-optical circuit for extraction and serial-to-parallel conversion of label bits from differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) packets. The circuit requires only two optical switches regardless of the number of bits to be extracted and parallelized from the packet. Experimental evidence of practical use of the circuit to four bit labels at 10 Gb/s is provided. The circuit is scalable with the number of bits, operates at low input power, and is suitable for photonic integration. The asynchronous nature of the circuit allows us to efficiently extract/read one specific label field of variable length without processing the entire label, leading to a simplified architecture of the label processing circuit