Design and performance of a monolithically integrated widely tunable all-optical wavelength converter with independent phase control

We report on a new widely tunable all-optical wavelength converter consisting of a sampled-grating distributed Bragg reflector (SGDBR) laser monolithically integrated with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer semiconductor optical amplifier (MZI-SOA)-based wavelength converter. The new design incorporates independent phase control of the interferometer and SOAs for amplification of the SGDBR output. For the first time, error-free operation for data rates of up to 10 Gb/s is reported for 35-nm output tuning range. The high-speed operation is enabled by high photon density in the SOA due to large power transfer from the on-board tunable laser and amplifiers. We also report on device sensitivity of -10 dBm at 2.5 Gb/s and -5 dBm at 10 Gb/s, with an average output power of 0 dBm.