On-Chip Optical Vector Quadrature De-Multiplexer Proposal for QAM De-Aggregation by Single Bi-Directional SOA-Based Phase-Sensitive Amplifier

In this paper, a simple optical vector quadrature de-multiplexer (QD) scheme is proposed for de-aggregating input 10 Gbaud 16/32/64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals into two pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) streams. The proposed QD is based on a single bi-directional degenerate phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA), where the wavelength and the polarization status of the extracted in-phase and quadrature components stay the same as the input signal. Since the proposed QD is realized using PSA based on semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), it is also possible to realize an on-chip QD system, providing an integrated platform for optical signal processing. Through numerical simulation, the transfer characteristics of the proposed QD system show that the SOA-based PSA has a high phase-sensitive gain extinction ratio of 44.1 dB. The constellations, error vector magnitudes (EVMs), and bit-error rates (BERs) of the data streams after the de-aggregation are numerically investigated to verify the proposed QD scheme. For the 10 Gbaud 16/32/64 QAM signals with an input optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of 25 dB, the de-aggregated PAM4/PAM6/PAM8 signals show 6.1, 5.6, and 8.2 dB receiver OSNR improvements at the BER of 10
⁻³
, respectively. Also, to optimize the performance of the subsystem, the BER performance dependence on the phase difference between two arms in the subsystem is also examined. The simulation results reveal that the proposed QD can accomplish the function of optical vector de-aggregation well for the high-level QAM signals. The proposed QD can be applied to information de-aggregation, format conversion, and direct detection for optical vector signals, which may have great potential values for the flexible optical networks.