Abstract

Many types of optical signal processing have been investigated for optical packet switching. Polarization bistable VCSELs are suitable optical functional devices for developing small and low-power-consumption systems. Thus, we have been investigating all-optical signal processing using the polarization bistable VCSELs [1, 2]. However, their stability and reliability have not been evaluated enough except BER measurements of flip-flop operation without AND-gate functionality [3]. In this presentation, we show experimental and calculated BER performances of all-optical flip-flop operation with AND-gate functionality using a 1.55-μm polarization bistable VCSEL. We also demonstrate an all-optical 2-bit recognition in a 4-bit header as an application to multi-bit signal processing using the flip-flop operation and packet switching using this method.

© 2015 IEEE