All-optical demultiplexing of 80 to 10 Gb/s signals with monolithic integrated high-performance Mach-Zehnder interferometer

A novel high-performance monolithic integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer with semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA's) in its arms has been realized and 80-Gb/s all-optical demultiplexing demonstrated. Penalty-free operation for 40-10 Gb/s demultiplexing has also been achieved. Dynamic range with respect to the input signal power for error-free operation at 40 Gb/s is more than 17 dB and fiber-to-fiber loss less than 2 dB. A theoretical model which takes into consideration amplifier gain dynamics and pulse propagation describes the demultiplexing experiments and predicts the device performances also at higher bit rates.