PERFORMANCE OF A RECONFIGURABLE WAVELENGTH CONVERTER BASED ON DUAL-PUMP-WAVE MIXING IN A SEMICONDUCTOR OPTICAL AMPLIFIER

We report on a wavelength converter based on dual pump wave mixing in an 1-mm-long bulk semiconductor optical amplifier. Very high conversio n efficiency (more than 0 dB) and signal-to-background-noise ratio (SB R) (16 dB), for large down- or up-wavelength shifts (30 mm) has been a chieved using parallel polarized pumps with low optical power (-13 dBm ), Orthogonal polarized pumps result in worse performance, having the advantage of polarization insensitivity for small wavelength spacing b etween them. The converter operates in a fixed input-tunable output or a tunable input-fixed output mode of operation. In each mode, the mea sured SBR is almost independent of the wavelength shift for either up- or down-conversion.