Simultaneous all-optical demultiplexing of a 40-Gb/s signal to 4 x 10 Gb/s WDM channel´s using an ultrafast fiber wavelength converter

We demonstrate simultaneous demultiplexing of a 40-Gb/s optical time division multiplexed stream to four 10-Gb/s data streams, each on a different wavelength, using a single ultrafast nonlinear fiber wavelength converter. The wavelength converter employs cross-phase modulation in a dispersion-shifted fiber and utilizes control pulses generated at four wavelengths by a single electroabsorption modulator. This technique can be scaled to demultiplex a very high bit-rate signal to multiple wavelength division multiplexed channels simultaneously using just one electroabsorption modulator and one fiber based wavelength converter. Additionally broad control pulses with limited extinction ratio do not adversely affect the performance of the demultiplexer. For a control pulsewidth of 11-12 ps, the measured power penalty is <1.5 dB. Increasing the control pulsewidth to 14 ps incurs an additional power penalty of only 0.5 dB.