| Technology has empowered people in all walks of life to generate, store, and communicate enormous amounts of data. Recent technological advances in high-speed backbone data networks, together with the growing trend toward bandwidth-demanding applications such as data and video sharing, cloud computing, and data collection systems, have created a need for higher capacities in signal transmission and signal processing.;Optical communication systems have long benefited from the large bandwidth of optical signals (beyond tera-hertz) to transmit information. Through the use of optical signal processing techniques, this Ph.D. dissertation explores the potential of very-high-speed optics to assist electronics in processing huge amounts of data at high speeds.;Optical signal processing brings together various fields of optics and signal processing---nonlinear devices and processes, analog and digital signals, and advanced data modulation formats---to achieve high-speed signal processing functions that can potentially operate at the line rate of fiber optic communications. Information can be encoded in amplitude, phase, wavelength, polarization, and spatial features of an optical wave to achieve high-capacity transmission. Many advances in the key enabling technologies have led to recent research in optical signal processing for digital signals that are encoded in one or more of these dimensions. Optical Kerr nonlinearities have femto-second response times that have been exploited for fast processing of optical signals. Various optical nonlinearities and chromatic dispersions have enabled key sub-system applications such as wavelength conversion, multicasting, multiplexing, demultiplexing, and tunable optical delays.;In this Ph.D. dissertation, we employ these recent advances in the enabling technologies for high-speed optical signal processing to demonstrate various techniques that can process phase- and amplitude-encoded optical signals at the line rate of optics. We use nonlinear media, such as highly nonlinear fiber, periodically poled lithium niobate, and semiconductor optical amplifiers, for nonlinear mixing of optical signals. We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel, fully tunable optical tapped-delay-line that is a key building block for signal processing functions. Applications such as finite impulse response filtering, equalization, correlation (pattern recognition), discrete Fourier transform, digital-to-analog conversion, and flexible optical signal conversion and generation are shown. The phase- and amplitude-preserving nature of the demonstrated techniques, together with their wide-tuning range, allows for processing of optical signals that carry different modulation formats with different data rates. The reconfigurability may apply to future optical networks that carry heterogeneous traffic with different modulation formats and baud rates. |
