Optical signal processing using a high-speed saturable absorber optical gate and its application to optical discrimination and de-multiplexing

Abstract

Increase of the bit rate of time-domain multiplexing is the important technological trend to achieve such ultra high capacity systems. Various optical processing circuits were employed in ultra high speed transmission experiments. We describe fundamental function of saturable absorber optical gate which will be a key device to establish such ultra high speed optical processing circuits using semi-conductor super-lattice structure. Several designs which will improve performance of the gate were proposed and comfirmed by experiments. We applied the gate to optical discriminator and optical de-multiplexer and reported experimental results.