Ultra-high-speed serial optical communications: Enabling technologies

This paper will present recently identified and demonstrated key technologies for ultra-high-speed serial communications. Certain key components such as stabilised highly non-linear fibre switches, periodically poled Lithium Niobate devices and semiconductor optical amplifiers will be described with demonstrations of 640 Gb/s transmission, clock recovery, demultiplexing, add/drop, wavelength conversion and channel identification. Timing jitter tolerance is addressed through techniques to create flat-top pulses.