Interferometric SOA-based optical switches for all-optical processing in communication networks and sampling systems

Network elements with bandwidths that exceed the capabilities of electronics will soon be required to meet the demand for capacity on the Internet. Although recent progress in fiber optic networking, such as the development of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) and the deployment of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), have provided a means for satisfying today's demands, future optical networking systems require new, innovative high-speed optical processing techniques. Optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) is a breakthrough technology for ensuring continued network scalability. This dissertation presents practical optical switching techniques available in the time domain and demonstrates novel applications of this technology to future communication and measurement systems.; A key enabling technology for optical processing in OTDM systems are all-optical switches. Interferometric optical switches using semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) nonlinearities are experimentally and theoretically evaluated. The strengths of individual switch geometries and their performance limitations are presented.; Reconfigurable serial fiber delay lines are also a key ingredient for enabling OTDM systems. These structures can be used to achieve high-speed time slot access, optical data generation, and analog waveform replication. Novel feed-forward serial optical delay lines capable of performing these functions are analyzed.; By combining active optical switches with optical delay lines, several optical routing platforms for data networking are possible. A system suitable for distributed multi-hop packet switching using all-optical address recognition is demonstrated. This work is followed by the development of a multicasting capable OTDM system suitable for optical router backplanes and high-speed supercomputer interconnects. Both experimental systems operated at 100 Gb/s and are scalable to 1 Tb/s and beyond.; Through extension of these novel optical devices, test and measurement applications using all-optical sampling techniques are also possible. Single-shot and continuous-time optical sampling systems for analog optical measurements are presented. Novel applications of this technology to photonic analog-to-digital conversion and biomedical imaging are proposed.; Finally, this dissertation emphasizes practical implementation aspects of high-performance optical processing technology to existing and future optical networks. Thorough evaluation of optical networking trends reveals that time domain optical processing technology provides a solution to ensure network scalability to meet the future data capacity demands of the Internet.