Proposal and Design of an All-Optical Encoder for Digitising Radio-over-Fibre Transceivers

Ricardo Ribeiro (1) , Frédéric Lucarz (2) , Bruno Fracasso (2)

1 Departamento de Engenharia de Telecomunicaçoes
2 OPT - Département Optique

In this paper it is proposed and designed an original all-optical Encoder (o-Encoder) intended, but not exclusively, to be part of future optical digitising radio-over-fibre (o-DRoF) transceiver. It is based on the Semiconductor Laser Amplifier Loop Mirror (SLALOM) configuration exploiting the nonlinearities of a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) in cross-switching regime. The proof-of-principle is established using 40-ps RZ control pulses at 2.5 GHz in the C-band. It outputs serially encoded, quantized and amplified optical RZ bits. Computer simulations of the proposed o-Encoder have shown promising results. The proposed device is rather compact, potentially optically integrable and requires much less input optical power (by several orders of magnitude) than other photonic-encoders and can also naturally convert wavelengths in the optical domain.

Mots clés: Analogue-digital conversion; Encoder; Microwave Photonics; Optical Signal Processing; Semiconductor optical amplifiers

Domaines: Electronique; Optique / photonique

Ricardo Ribeiro, Frédéric Lucarz, Bruno Fracasso. Proposal and Design of an All-Optical Encoder for Digitising Radio-over-Fibre Transceivers. NOC 2013 : 18th European Conference on Networks and Optical Communications ; OC&I 2013 : 8th Conference on Optical Cabling and Infrastructure, Jul 2013, Graz, Austria. ⟨hal-00960068⟩