PhD Dissertation Defense

High Speed All-Optical Data Processing in Fast Semiconductor and Optical Fiber Based Devices

Future generations of communication systems demand ultra high speed data processing and switching components. Conventional electrical parts have reached their bottleneck both speed-wise and efficiency-wise. The idea of manipulating high speed data in optical domain is gaining more popularity. In this thesis work, we proposed and demonstrated various schemes of all-optical Boolean logic gate at data rate as high as 80Gb/s by using semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), SOA Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI), highly nonlinear fiber(HNLF) and optical fiber based components. With the emerge of quantum dot (QD) based semiconductor devices, speed limit of all optical data processing has a chance to boost up to 250Gb/s. We proposed and simulated QD-SOA based Boolean functions, and their application such as shift register and pseudorandom bit sequence generation (PRBS). Clock and data recovery of high speed data signals has been simulated and demonstrated by injection lock and phase lock loop techniques in a fiber and SOA ring and an optical-electrical (OE) feedback loop.