3956 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 37, NO. 16, AUGUST 15, 2019
On-Chip All-Optical Wavelength Conversion of
PAM-4 Signals Using an Integrated SOA-Based
Turbo-Switch Circuit
Adnan A. E. Hajomer , Marco Presi , Nicola Andriolli , Claudio Porzi , Weisheng Hu ,
Giampiero Contestabile
, and Xuelin Yang
Abstract—We experimentally demonstrate on-chip all-optical
wavelength conversion (AOWC) of four-level pulse amplitude mod-
ulation (PAM-4) signals by cross-gain modulation in an InP mono-
lithically integrated turbo-switch circuit based on semiconductor
optical amplifiers (SOAs). Full characterization of the photonic
integrated circuit (PIC) is given, where sevenfold reduction in
effective gain recovery is achieved by the PIC turbo-switch com-
pared with a case of single SOA switch. Wavelength conversion of
25 Gbit/s PAM-4 signal in the C-band is successfully demonstrated
with ∼2 dB power penalty at 1 × 10
−3
bit error rate. Moreover, the
wavelength dependence of the converter is studied. The integrated
AOWC device has the advantages of high-speed switching oper-
ation as well as small footprint, high stability, and low switching
power.
Index Terms—4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4), all-
optical wavelength conversion (AOWC), cross-gain modulation
(XGM), integrated turbo-switch.
I. INTRODUCTION
W
ITH the ever-increasing bandwidth demands in data cen-
ter networks (DCNs) as a result of web and cloud-based
services, optical interconnection has been emerged as a poten-
tial solution for next-generation DCNs for its abilities to pro-
vide larger bandwidth, low latency, and low power consump-
tion [1]. For illustration, currently, 100 Gbit/s pluggable optical
transceivers are available and targeting 20 Tbit/s, while for opti-
cal switching, the bandwidth density is expected to have a scaling
trend of × 10 every five years [2]. For optical routing in DCNs
Manuscript received December 13, 2018; revised April 10, 2019 and May 23,
2019; accepted May 24, 2019. Date of publication May 28, 2019; date of current
version July 31, 2019. This work was supported in part by the Natural Science
Fund of China under Grant 61571291, Grant 61431009, and Grant 61221001,
in part by the International S&T Cooperation Program of China under Grant
2016YFE0104500, and in part by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE-
UST) through the bilateral project CANTON. (Corresponding author: Xuelin
Yang.)
A. A. E. Hajomer, W. Hu, and X. Yang are with the Shanghai Institute for
Advanced Communication and Data Science, State Key Laboratory of Advanced
Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Shanghai 200240, China (e-mail: adnanadil80@yahoo.com; wshu@sjtu.edu.cn;
x.yang@sjtu.edu.cn).
M. Presi, N. Andriolli, C. Porzi, and G. Contestabile are with the Scuola Supe-
riore Sant’Anna, Pisa 56124, Italy (e-mail: marco.presi@santannapisa.it; nick@
sssup.it; claudio.porzi@sssup.it; contesta@sssup.it).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2019.2919650
based wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) transmission,
all-optical wavelength conversions (AOWCs) play a vital role to
improve the network scalability by allowing wavelength reuse
[3]–[6]. An example of possible application of AOWC in intra-
data center context has been reported in [5], where AOWC is
connected with arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR) to
increase the flexibility of the wavelength allocation. Concerning
the modulation techniques for next-generation DCNs, coherent
communication is considered nowadays as a possible solution
for inter-data center interconnects, while 4-level pulse amplitude
modulation (PAM-4) format has attracted much attention for
intra-data center interconnects [7], since it offers many advan-
tages such as simple transmitter and receiver structure, low-cost
interfaces, high capacity and power efficiency [8], [9]. Conse-
quently, AOWCs of PAM-4 signals is an indispensable com-
ponent for establishing all-optical and high-speed wavelength
routers for intra-data center interconnects.
To achieve wavelength conversion, several methods have been
reported. The current approach is the optical-electrical-optical
(O/E/O) converters. However, O/E/O has larger power consump-
tion for high data rates, if compared with AOWCs in switch
fabrics, and the quantitative comparisons have been reported in
[10], [11]. Consequently, AOWC based on the optical nonlin-
earity in active and passive devices have gained much atten-
tion. Examples of these methods include cross-gain modula-
tion (XGM) [12], cross-phase modulation (XPM) [13]–[15] or
four-wave mixing (FWM) [16] in semiconductor optical ampli-
fiers (SOAs); nonlinear interactions in highly nonlinear fibers
(HNLFs) [17]. AOWCs have also been reported using period-
ically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) converters [18]. Among
these techniques, SOA based schemes are attractive because of
its large nonlinearities, low switching power, compactness, and
high photonic integration capability [12], [19]. However, SOAs
are often limited by the slow gain recovery, which is a limiting
factor in high-speed AOWC of intensity modulation and direc-
tion (IM/DD) formats such as PAM-4. In order to deal with the
slow operation speed of conventional SOAs in AOWC, vari-
ous approaches have been proposed. For example, high-speed
AOWC was demonstrated by spectral selective filtering [20]–
[22], at the cost of large degradation of the converted signal
optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR), due to the suppression of
the optical carrier.
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