All-optical demultiplexing using fiber cross-phase modulation (XPM) and optical filtering

All-optical demultiplexing of 80-Gb/s data to 10 Gb/s is demonstrated using spectral broadening-induced by cross-phase modulation (XPM) with subsequent optical band-pass filtering. Due to the time derivative effect of XPM, the control pulsewidth can be larger than the bit-slot of the incoming data, and still give a switch window suitable for demultiplexing. Operation at 10/sup -12/ bit-error rate is demonstrated. In principle, this approach will scale to extremely high bit rates due to the ultrafast fiber nonlinearities.