EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATIONS OF ALL-OPTICAL CONVERSIONS BETWEEN THE RZAND NRZ DATA FORMATS INCORPORATING NONINVERTING WAVELENGTH SHIFTING LEADING TO FORMAT TRANSPARENCY

We demonstrate a unique semiconductor optical amplifier based system t hat performs the converting functions of: 1) RZ-to-NRZ; and 2) NRZ-to- RZ-to-NRZ by using noninverting cross-gain compression wavelength shif ting. Our robust NRZ-to-RZ-to-NRZ reconverter was tested using 80 km o f fiber and 4 EDFA's, We show that at 1-Gb/s, both functions can be re alized with low power penalties (<2.0 dB).