An all-optical picosecond-pulse packet buffer based on four-wave mixing loading and intracavity soliton control

All-optical buffering is critical for opticalipliotonic packet switchers or 11' routcrs to solve contention issucs and for access nodes to bridge thc speed gap. Several typcs or opticalipliotonic bulrcrs have been clcinoiistrated utilizing fiber re-circulating loops [l-31 aiid regenerative loops [4J. (:onvcntional photonic rc-cil-culating-looi) designs [ 1,2] have cinployetl EL)l'A or SOA to conipensatc the round-trip loss while electrically driven modulator is used to maintain the signal timing. In addition to the bil-rate limibation imposed hy the speed botllencck of clcctrical devices, thcsc typcs of buffers siffcr from serious extinction-ratio clegradation of the stored signal owing to the accumulatcd ASR noisc. In this paper, we report a novel approach that is based on row-wavc mixing (FWM) loading and intracavity pcriodic soliton control [SI. 'l'hc target packct is loaded into the storagc loop hy means oftlie I'WM intcraction hetween the putnp and signal piilses arid storcd as the resulting idler pulse Lrain. The timing arid amplihide of ihc stored pulses are stabilizcd by periodic soliton control [Cl through synchronous paramctric-gain modulation inside a pulsc-piiniped NOLM and thc soliton shaping properly of ii NA1,M. A picosccontl, 20Gbit1s packct pattern is storcd for L i p to seconds or millions of circtilatioiis in the slorage loop.