Optical Functional Devices Using Semiconductor Laser Nonlinearity

Various kinds of optical functional devices, are constructed based on the nonlinearities of semiconductor lasers as shown in Table 1. The most distinctive feature is that they have optical gain. Optical gain results in the following advantages: (1) low optical switching power. High ON-OFF ratio, and large fan-out in bistable devices. (2) low operating power in optical wavelength converters, and (3) narrow bandwidth in optical wavelength filters.