All optical signal processing for hybrid OTDM/WDM switching networks

All optical signal processing techniques are being developed as a potential replacement technology for electronics to ease the bottlenecks at the optical network nodes. In particular, optical time division multiplexing, or OTDM, technology is an attractive technology to complement the present WDM optical systems due to its strength in all optical signal processing. One optical signal processing issues that is addressed by OTMD is all optical 3R regeneration. Using an optical switch called the Terahertz Optical Asymmetric Demultiplexer (TOAD), all optical 3R regeneration was demonstrated at both 2.5Gb/s and 10Gb/s.; In addition to 3R regeneration, the TOAD also functions as an OTDM demultiplexer. The TOAD can generate a narrow optical sampling window, with the exact shape of which determined by the location of the SOA placed inside the optical fiber loop. By cascading two TOADs, each with their SOA placed at opposite sides of the loop, a very narrow sampling window was demonstrated experimentally.; In chapter four, a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) ring laser was demonstrated to have optical spectral bistability. As a result of resonance pulling and the overlapping of the cavity and Lyot filter responses, the tunable CW laser source provides stable optical output at a common input power. To take advantage of the optical spectral bistability in all optical switching, optical pulses controlled by a mechanical delay line and a TOAD was used to optically trigger the ring laser from one bistable state to another.; A new OTDM channel selector is demonstrated using a single modulator and a parallel delay line structure in chapter five. This OTDM channel selector was demonstrated to rapidly tune three timeslots of 3.3GHz each with an aggregate accessible bandwidth of 10GHz and four timeslots of 12.5GHz each with an aggregate accessible bandwidth of 50GHz. This technology was then used to switch multiple WDM wavelength channels in chapter six. The four supercontinuum generated WDM pulses were injected into the input port of a TOAD while a clock generated by the OTDM channel selector was injected into the control port of the same TOAD. This demonstration successfully switches the three of the four wavelengths in this system with an average switching time of 173 picoseconds.; In the last chapter, a new WDM/OTDM/WDM switching fabric based on some of the research presented in this dissertation is proposed.