A 40Gbit/s 16-bit photonic parallel-to-serial converter

We have developed a novel photonic parallel-to-serial converter. It can be driven by simple and low-cost CMOS logic circuits with low power consumption, and is compact and extensible for the input channel number. These advantages originate from the effective combination of electrical and optical multiplexing. In addition, it is suitable for burst optical packet generation, and overcomes electronic bandwidth limitation that is indispensable for high-speed photonic packet-switched networks.