All-optical NRZ-OOK-to-RZ-OOK format conversions with tunable duty cycles using nonlinear polarization rotation of a semiconductor optical amplifier

We experimentally demonstrate an all-optical 10 Gb/s format conversion from non-return-to-zero (NRZ) on-off-keying (OOK) to return-to-zero (RZ)-OOK with tunable duty cycle in the whole C-band using nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) arising in an semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The experimental results show that, by tuning the polarizer at the SOA output, an RZ signal with tunable duty cycle from 33% to 66% could be obtained with an extinction ratio(ER) over 10 dB. In addition, we show that the NRZ-to-RZ conversion with duty cycle of 33–66% can be obtained with less than 1 dB power penalty at the bit error ratio (BER) of 10−9. The device can facilitate the cross-connection between optical transmission networks employing different modulation formats.