Experimental study of a phase modulator using an active interferometric device

Abstract

Abstract-A novel architecture for an optical phase modulator is presented and experimentally demonstrated. This approach relies on a commercially available integrated MachZehnder interferometer structure with Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (MZI-SOA) and it is based in cross-phase modulation effect (XPM). The feasibility of the proposed optical phase modulator is experimentally investigated using different scenarios of input power and bit rates.

2 × 10 Gbit/s nonreturn‐to‐zero‐ook to 10 Gbaud quasicontinuous phase modulation all‐optical conversion using cascaded mach–zehnder interferometer‐semiconductor optical amplifiers

“…By properly setting the input optical powers, phase shifters voltage, and controlling the SOA bias currents, signal λ 1 from the two SOAs interferes constructively in one port and destructively in the other, according to the XOR operation. From the destructive output, signal λ 1 presents minimal power variations and has a phase of 0 or 180° corresponding to “0” or “1” of the NRZ‐OOK Sequence 1, as we have experimentally demonstrated [7]. The second stage of the modulator is similar to the first, but now the signal coming from MZI‐SOA1 is launched into MZI‐SOA2 with an assist CW signal λ 2 .…”

Inherent fabrication yields and asymmetries impacts on MZI-SOA static modelling

“…1 (inset). They can be used in logical gates [2], digital phase modulation [3], switching and wavelength conversion [4], all-optical processing and signal regeneration [5], among others.…”