Turbo-switched Mach-Zehnder interferometer performance as all-optical signal processing element at 160Â Gb/s

Two variations of the active Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) that incorporate the recently proposed turbo-switch effect are introduced to carry out three key functionalities in forthcoming high-speed optical telecommunication networks, namely, all-optical wavelength conversion, photonic XOR gating and optical time-division demultiplexing. Their performance is numerically investigated at 160 Gb/s using a sophisticated semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) model. The more practical of the two proposed geometries shows error-free operation as XOR Boolean gate, low patterning as wavelength converter, and poor performance as demultiplexer. For comparison, results derived from well-accepted (or typical) schemes are also presented, and the role of the required extra SOAs as distinguishing elements of the new architectures is investigated.