TECHNIQUE FOR SUPPRESSION OF PATTERN DEPENDENCE IN A SEMICONDUCTOR-OPTICAL-AMPLIFIER WAVELENGTH CONVERTER

Wavelength converters that employ cross-gain modulation (XGM) in semic onductor optical amplifiers (SOA's) are Limited in bit rate by the amp lifier's pattern dependent response, We substantially suppress this pa ttern dependence by converting the phase modulation at the data transi tions to amplitude modulation using a fiber grating filter, We use thi s technique to obtain error-free wavelength conversion of 10-Gb/s nonr eturn-to-zero (NRZ) data using an SOA that showed an error floor at 10 (-5) bit-error rate (BER) when used alone.