Optical Comparison Operation for 8-Bit QPSK-Modulated Signal by Using Serially-Cascaded Delay Line Interferometer

Abstract

An all-optical comparator is desirable to realize large-capacity, fully-transparent, and energy-efficient communication systems, as it is considered to be a fundamental component to perform most of the operations, including packet switching, label recognition, error detection and correction, and so on. However, most of the previous studies have been confined to the on–off keying (OOK) modulation format, not phase-shift keying (PSK) modulation. In this paper, the author provides a novel optical comparator designed for quadrature PSK (QPSK)-modulated signal, which comprises a code word with 8-bit length, using a serially-cascaded delay line interferometer. The proposed comparator yields constellations having the information of a Hamming distance based on the designed code, when several patterns of QPSK signal are injected into the comparator. The paper experimentally demonstrates the feasibility of the optical comparison operation for 8-bit QPSK-modulated return-to-zero (RZ) signal at 10 Gbaud.

Keywords

• optical communication
• optical signal processing
• comparison operation