40-Gb/s Multichannel NRZ to CSRZ Format Conversion Using an SOA

An all-optical converter from nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) to carrier-suppressed return-to-zero modulation format is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The converter is based on cross gain and phase modulation in a semiconductor optical amplifier. Single- and multichannel operation is experimentally assessed at 40 Gb/s. In single-channel operation, the required optical signal-to-noise ratio for a bit-error rate of $10^{-9}$ is improved by 3 dB, in comparison to the input NRZ. Considering multichannel operation with two and four channels, this improvement decreases by only 0.6 and 1.5 dB, respectively.