Theoretical Analysis of High-Speed All-Optical Turbo-Switches

A detailed theoretical model is proposed to simulate the turbo-switch incorporating two cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). The model takes into account various important physical effects including interband and intraband carrier transitions along with gain dispersion, and bidirectional amplified spontaneous emission. The simulation results are in excellent agreement with the reported experimental measurements. Moreover, simulations of turbo-switch are extended to explain the 160 Gb/s wavelength conversion, pattern effect mitigation, and switch structure optimization. Novel turbo-switch schemes are suggested to further improve the switching speed.