A Deeply Saturated Differentially-Biased SOA-MZI for 20 Gb/s Burst-Mode NRZ Traffic

We experimentally demonstrate an optical Burst-Mode Wavelength Converter (BMWC) that simultaneously provides power equalization and wavelength conversion of Non-Return to Zero-On/Off Keying (NRZ-OOK) data and operates up to 20 Gb/s. It employs a balanced, differentially-biased, Semiconductor Optical Amplifier-Mach Zehnder Interferometer (SOA-MZI) operating in deeply saturated regime and its performance is evaluated at 10 Gb/s and 20 Gb/s with loud/soft peak–power ratios up to 9 dB and 5 dB, respectively. Bit Error Rate (BER) measurements reveal error free operation with up to 6.1 dB BER improvement at 10 Gb/s and 3.51 dB at 20 Gb/s, while the use of a single SOA-MZI yields 50% reduction in the number of active components against state-of-the-art BMWCs. Finally, the proposed BMWC is evaluated in non-dispersion compensated 25 km fiber transmission experiment, providing error-free operation with 1.43 dB BER improvement, validating its capabilities for potential employment in Passive Optical Networks (PON) and 5G fronthaul networks.