High-Speed All-Optical Generation of Advanced Modulation Formats Using Photonic-Integrated All-Optical Format Converter

We propose and demonstrate all-optical method for generating advanced modulation formats with high-spectral efficiency. The proposed method is based on all-optical format conversion using photonic-integrated semiconductor optical amplifier-Mach-Zehnder interferometers. It enables application of advanced modulation formats at data rates not directly accessible using electronic means only. We demonstrate generation of single-polarization 86.4-Gb/s binary phase-shift keying and 173-Gb/s quadrature phase-shift keying optical signals.