IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 16, NO.

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Optical Digital Signal Processing in a Single SOA Without Assist Probe Light
Claudio Porzi, Mirco Scaffardi, Luca Pot`, Member, IEEE, and Antonella Bogoni
AbstractBy exploiting nonlinear effects in a single semiconductor optical amplier, different functionalities for all-optical digital signal processing applications are implemented. In particular, we demonstrate all-optical EXCLUSIVE-OR (XOR) logical operation and all-optical binary-to-quaternary ASK format conversion suitable for 2-bit all-optical digital-to-analog conversion (DAC). Both operations are performed without the use of any extra probe light beam. Beside the advantage of reduced complexity in terms of number of active elements the proposed architecture allows to preserve the input signal wavelength at the gate output and is suitable for photonic integration. Error-free operation at 10 Gb/s is demonstrated for the all-optical XOR gate, whereas correct dynamic operation, always at 10 Gb/s is observed for the binary-to-quaternary ASK format converter. Based on the proposed single semiconductor optical amplier architecture a possible implementation of 3-bit DAC scheme with reduced number of active gates with respect to previously reported schemes is also presented. Index TermsOptical data processing, optical digital-to-analog conversion (DAC), optical format conversion, optical logic devices, optical signal processing, semiconductor optical ampliers.

I. INTRODUCTION

ODERN and next-generation digital optical communication systems require cost-effective, compact, and lowpower consuming subsystems to perform efcient high-speed digital signal processing in the optical domain. All-optical logical gates can be conveniently exploited for realizing a number of digital signal processing functionalities with a wide range of applications in ber-optic transport and packet networks, and optical access systems. Semiconductor optical ampliers (SOAs) offer several advantages for realizing all-optical logical operations in terms of low-power operation, high nonlinearity, compactness, and possibility to be merged with other functional elements in photonics integrated circuits. Among others logical operations, EXCLUSIVE-OR (XOR) has a wide range of applications, such as pattern recognition, binary adders and counters, pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS) data generation, and data encryption/encoding [1][11]. Most of the previously proposed

Manuscript received August 31, 2009; revised October 24, 2009; accepted November 8, 2009. Date of publication March 4, 2010; date of current version October 6, 2010. This work was supported in part by the Building the Future Optical Network in Europe-project, and in part by the Europes Research Network on Photonic Systems (EURO-FOS) project, both networks of excellence funded by the European Commission through the 7th Information Communication Technology Framework Programme. C. Porzi is with the Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Via Moruzzi, 56124 Pisa, Italy (e-mail: claudio.porzi@sssup.it). M. Scaffardi, L. Pot`, and A. Bogoni are with the Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni, Via Moruzzi, 56124 Pisa, Italy (e-mail: mirco.scaffardi@cnit.it; luca.poti@cnit.it; antonella.bogoni@cnit.it). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JSTQE.2009.2037335

schemes exploit an assist probe signal (either a clock or a continuous wave (CW) signal) onto which the result of the XOR operation between two input optical signals at different wavelengths is transferred. A scheme that avoids the use of a probe signal, based on cross-polarization rotation (XPR) in a single SOA, is originally proposed in [2]. This scheme can only operate with two input data signals at different wavelengths, and the resulting XOR output encompasses pulses at different wavelengths. However, a single-wavelength output signal is a desirable and advantageous feature. Furthermore, in many practical applications, the ability to perform XOR operation between data at the same wavelength would also bring a relevant reduction of costs and complexity. Also, XOR operation in a single SOA without probe light was demonstrated by using four-wave mixing (FWM) effect for polarization-shift key [3] and return-to-zero differential phase-shift keying (RZ-DPSK) signals [4]. However, FWM-based schemes are not suitable for ONOFF keying (OOK) modulated signals and cannot be operated with signals at the same wavelength. A scheme operating with input data at the same wavelength, and avoiding the use of a probe signal is also proposed in [5], where two SOAs are employed. Here, we demonstrate that single input/output wavelength alloptical XOR operation without assist probe signal can be performed by exploiting nonlinear effects in a single SOA. Errorfree operation at 10 Gb/s is observed. This architecture offers thus the advantage of minimized number of both optical active components and required light sources. Furthermore, the same scheme is also suitable for performing binary-to-quaternary ASK format conversion, which is at the basis of 2-bit all-optical digital-to-analog conversion (DAC). All-optical multilevel encoding and/or DAC have been investigated by researchers in the last years, and have been proposed and exploited for increasing spectral efciency [12], as a label/payload encoding technique [13], and for implementing different ultrafast signal processing functions like all-optical pattern recognition for label processing in packet switched networks applications [14], [15], and arbitrary waveform generation for radar and display applications [16]. Most of the proposed all-optical schemes rely on coherent optical summation of data bits at the same wavelength, which requires active control of the signals phase. A scheme avoiding control of the signals phases for all-optical multilevel encoding/DAC, was demonstrated in [17] by using nonlinear optical gates and an assist probe clock signal. The lack of accurate phase control brings advantages in terms of reduced circuit complexity, and costs. We have also recently proposed a novel approach to realize phase-control-free alloptical binary-to-quaternary ASK encoding (2-bit DAC), which further reduces the circuit complexity by avoiding the use of the

1077-260X/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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TABLE I XOR TRUTH TABLE

Fig. 1. Experimental setup for all-optical XOR operation in a single SOA without assist probe light.

assist probe signal [18]. This scheme exploited two SOAs-based nonlinear gates for the 2-bit operation. Thus, here we further simplify our scheme and demonstrate that the same operation can be implemented exploiting nonlinear effects in a single SOA without any active phase control and without any assist probe signal. Correct dynamic operation of the device is demonstrated at 10 Gb/s for the rst time to the best of our knowledge for a single-wavelength phase control-free scheme. The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we introduce the experimental setup of the proposed XOR architecture and describe its operation principle. Section III shows the experimental results relative to the single input/output wavelength all-optical XOR with a single SOA without assist probe light. Section IV discusses the application of the proposed scheme to all-optical binary-to-quaternary ASK encoder. Section V summarizes the relative experimental results. In Section VI, we propose extension of operation to a higher number of converted levels, the case of 3-bit operation (eight output converted levels) is treated. Finally, Section VII presents the discussion and the conclusions. II. ALL-OPTICAL XOR WITH A SINGLE SOA: EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND OPERATION PRINCIPLE The experimental setup we have adopted for realizing the alloptical XOR is shown in Fig. 1. The output of an actively mode locked ber laser (MLFL) at 1535 nm operating at 10 GHz and providing 8-ps-long optical pulses is sent to an electrooptical modulator (EOM) driven by a data pattern generator. The optical pulses are thus modulated with a 1100 data sequence before being amplied by means of an erbium-doped ber amplier (EDFA) and split into two paths. An optical lter (OF) is used to remove the EDFA out-of-band noise. An optical delay line (ODL) is inserted into one data path to generate all the possible bit combinations at the two XOR gate inputs (IN1 and IN2 in the gure). Each gate input is connected to one of the two facets of an SOA by means of optical circulators (OCs). The OCs also allow to retrieve the signals after they have travelled through the amplier in opposite directions. The signals leaving the amplier are then recollected by means of a polarization beam combiner (PBC). The scheme operation relies on different nonlinear effects originated by gain/phase modulation when two data pulses counter-propagates simultaneously along the ampli-

er. Due to the cross-gain compression effect (XGC) indeed, the gain experienced by each of the two pulses passing through the SOA is reduced with respect to the gain affecting a single pulse travelling alone in the amplier. The relative amount of gain reduction can be controlled by properly adjusting the power levels of the signals at the gate inputs by means of variable attenuators (VAs). Furthermore, the polarization of each pulse is also affected by the other pulse via XPR effect, which produces simultaneous rotation of the polarization state of the two pulses at the amplier output. The amount of polarization rotation for the case of two pulses travelling through the semiconductor amplier is different from that originated by self-polarization rotation (SPR) when only one optical pulse is present at either IN1 or IN2 . Finally, when two pulses are present in the amplier, crossphase modulation (XPM) effect induces a spectral broadening of the output pulses larger than the spectral shift originated by self-phase modulation (SPM) alone, when a single pulse crosses the amplier [6]. The combination of all these effects can then be conveniently exploited for discriminating at the all-optical XOR gate output between the cases of single data pulse and two data pulses entering the amplier. In particular, the polarization states of the different signals at the SOA inputs/outputs are adjusted with polarization controllers (PCs) in such a way that when two data pulses enter the gate and experience XPR inside the SOA, pulse rejection after the PBC (which acts as a polarizer for its input signals) is maximized for each of the two pulses leaving the amplier. Moreover, the central wavelength of two sharp bandpass OFs placed on the output data paths (OF1 and OF2 in Fig. 1), is opportunely set in such a way that the SPM-induced spectral red-shift falls within the lter bandwidth, whereas the larger XPM-induced red-shift is cut off by the lters. Thus, the combined action of XPR, XPM and XGM effects can be exploited to almost fully suppress the gate output power level when two data pulses are sent to its inputs. On the other hand, when a pulse travels alone the amplier (that is, no other pulse crosses the SOA in the opposite direction) it does not experience neither XGC, XPR nor XPM-induced extra spectral shift. As a result, the single pulse travelling in the amplier sees all the available SOA gain, and the amount of experienced SPR and SPM are such that it is let fairly through the PBC and the OFs. Thus, an optical pulse is now present at the gate output. Finally, when no data pulse is present neither at IN1 nor at IN2 , the gate output level is clearly zero. The aforementioned described situations corresponds to the operation of a XOR gate, as illustrated by Table I. It can be noticed from Fig. 1 that the

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Fig. 3. Spectra at the output of OF1 (OF1 out) and OF2 (OF2 out). The spectrum after the lter in the optically preamplier receiver that was used for errors detection is also shown in the gure.

Fig. 2. Oscilloscope traces at gate input (IN1 , IN2 ), and gate output for the all-optical XOR gate. OUT1 (OUT2 ) represents the PBC output when the input branch connected to OF2 (OF1) is disconnected. XOR OUT is taken after the output polarizer by connecting both the inputs of the PBC.

signals entering the input ports of the PBC are recombined at its output with orthogonal state of polarization, since they are recollected through the two distinct inputs of the PBC. In order to guarantee a single-polarization output signal, a polarizer oriented at 45 with respect to the PBC output axes is exploited (see Fig. 1). In our experiment, the power levels (average) of the data signals at the two SOA facets, coming from IN1 and IN2 , are 6 and 0 dBm, respectively. This difference in power levels is ascribed to an asymmetric SOA behavior for signals travelling in opposite directions. The amplier driving current is set in the experiment at 160 mA. III. ALL-OPTICAL XOR: RESULTS In Fig. 2, the oscilloscope traces showing the data sequence at the gate inputs (IN1 and IN2 ), and at the gate output are reported. OUT1 (OUT2 ) represents the PBC output when the input branch connected to OF2 (OF1) is disconnected. The XOR OUT is obtained by coupling the outputs of both OF1 and OF2 in the PBC and realigning their polarization state with the polarizer. We used 1-nm bandwith bandpass OFs with sharp roll-off and nearly rectangular shape. The output spectra after the OF1 and OF2 are shown in Fig. 3, where it can be seen that the optimal center wavelengths of the two lters were slightly shifted (of about 0.3 nm) with respect to each other.

The output extinction ratio (ER) is measured to be 8.6 dB, whereas the input ER is 10.4 dB. As previously mentioned, for this experiment, we have employed relatively long optical pulses with a full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) larger than 8 ps. However, a larger nonlinear spectral shift would be obtained at the SOA outoput if shorter pulses were used [19]. This means that the SPM- and XPM-induced spectral shifts would get more separated as the pulses duration gets shorter. In turns, the action of the selective sharp bandpass OFs after the SOA would be more effective, enabling stronger rejection of the optical signals for the case of two pulses travelling in the amplier. Thus, we expect that an improved ER ratio of the gate output (measured as the ratio between its peak value and the peak of the non ideally rejected pulse) and an improved overall output signal quality can be obtained by reducing the input pulses width. A weak dependence of the relative delay of the input pulses was also observed for the output waveform. This is due to a corresponding variation in the nonlinear interaction length for each pulse inside the amplier. However, for sufciently small relative delays one can still counteract the change of the nonlinear interaction strength by optimizing bias condition of the various PCs, VAs, and OFs in nonlinear gate. Assuming the minimum interaction length to be at least one third of the SOA length, for a 1.5 mm long device as that used, the acceptable relative delay is estimated to be approximately 2.5 ps. The results of bit error rate (BER) measurements are reported in Fig. 4 together with the input/output eye diagrams. The BER measurements were performed by using the 1100 input sequence shown in Fig. 2. A power penalty of 2 dB at a BER of 109 is observed with respect to the back-to-back (B2B) case. In performing the BER measurements, we used a standard optically preamplied receiver, consisting of an EDFA, an OF and VAs. The spectrum of the signal after the 0.6 nm bandwidth OF in the preamplied receiver is also shown in Fig. 3 (dashed line). IV. EXTENSION TO BINARY-TO-QUATERNARY ASK FORMAT CONVERSION (2-BIT DAC) The experimental setup of Fig. 1 can be exploited in a straightforward way to realize all-optical binary-to-quaternary ASK

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TABLE II INPUTOUTPUT RELATIONS FOR THE 2-BIT ALL-OPTICAL DAC

Fig. 4.

BER curves. Insets: input/output eye diagrams.

encoding, when the two input signals represent the least significant bit (LSB) and the most signicant bit (MSB) of a binary sequence to be encoded in a quaternary ASK signal. For alloptical DAC purposes, with the LSB and MSB originating from the same data stream, a serial-to-parallel conversion stage (for instance by using standard time-add/drop multiplexing technique [20]), as proposed in [17], should be inserted before the circuit to provide to IN1 and IN2 the correct input bits (at half the bit rate of the binary stream). With reference to Fig. 1, let us assume that the LSB is sent to IN1 and the MSB is sent to IN2 . Thus, when both the LSB and the MSB are a logical 0, the output power level after the PBC is clearly zero (gate output level: level0 ). When only one signal among MSB and LSB is 1, being the other one 0, no cross-induced nonlinear effects appear in the amplier, and an optical pulse can be generated at the output of the PBC for both these two cases, as seen earlier. However, the amplitude of the output pulse emerging from the PBC corresponding to one of its input branch can be made different from the amplitude of the output pulse emerging from the PBC corresponding to the other input branch, by still acting on the different PCs in the signals paths. In particular, the gate output power for the case MSB = 0 AND LSB = 1 (output level: level1 ) can be made arbitrary lower than the gate output power for the case MSB = 1 AND LSB = 0 (output level: level3 ). When MSB = 1 AND LSB = 1, cross-induced nonlinear effects originates in the amplier. However, unlike the case of the XOR gate, the parameters of the gate are adjusted in such a way that that output of the PBC is minimized (i.e., suppressed) only for one of the input signals. The power level of the two signals in the amplier can then be adjusted with the VAs, in such a way that the cross-induced effects are affecting signicantly only one of the two pulses. For instance, the power level of the MSB can induce enough gain compression, polarization rotation, and wavelength shift in the amplier so that the LSB is completely cancelled at the output of the PBC. On the other hand, with proper signals power imbalance at the SOA input, the MSB can be more weakly affected by XGC, XPM, and XPR, and it can be partially transmitted at the output of the PBC. Thus, for the case of MSB = 1 AND LSB = 1, only an output pulse coming from the MSB output path is generated with an output power level, level2 lower than the case MSB = 1 AND LSB = 0. This corresponds to the generation of a gray-coded quaternary ASK signal (2-bit gray-coded DAC) at the output of the gate,

Fig. 5. Oscilloscope traces at gate input (LSB, MSB), and gate output for the all-optical binary-to-quaternary encoder. OUT1 (OUT2 ) represents the PBC output when the input branch connected to OF2 (OF1) is disconnected. OUT_tot is taken after the output polarizer by connecting both the inputs of the PBC.

as summarized in Table II. Again, OUT1 (OUT2 ) represents the PBC output when the input branch connected to OF2 (OF1) is disconnected. The VAs and PCs can be also used to equalize the power difference between the output levels. It should be noted that binary code can also be generated with this architecture. When MSB = 1 AND LSB = 0, the MSB output polarization state should be set to partially block the MSB output pulses at the PBC, whereas when MSB = 1 AND LSB = 1, the presence of the LSB induces a change of the MSB polarization which increases the transmission of MSB through the PBC. This situation corresponds to a gate output power level for the case MSB = 1 AND LSB = 0 (output level: level2 ) lower than the case MSB = 1 AND LSB = 1 (output level: level3 ). In this case, a binary-coded quaternary ASK signal would be generated (being the output level case MSB = 0 AND LSB = 1, level1 , still lower than level2 ). V. BINARY-TO-QUATERNARY ASK FORMAT CONVERSION (2-BIT DAC): RESULTS In Fig. 5, the oscilloscope traces showing the data sequence at the gate inputs (LSB and MSB), and gate output are shown.

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TABLE III INPUTOUTPUT RELATIONS FOR THE 3-BIT ALL-OPTICAL DAC

Fig. 6.

Input (left) and output (right) eye diagrams.

Fig. 7.

Scheme for the 3-bit operation (2-to-8 ASK encoder or 3-bit DAC).

OUT_tot represents the single-polirized output signal after the polarizer at the PBC output. In the gure, for clarity, the peak power of OUT1 and OUT2 signals are normalized to the same levels. It should be clear that, by means of the PCs, the two signals amplitude can be independently adjusted in order to provide the quaternary signals at the output of the PBC, as shown in the bottom trace of Fig. 5 (OUT_tot). The input/output eye diagrams, detected with a 10 GHz bandwidth photodiode, are also shown in Fig. 6. For this experiment, the power levels (average) of the MSB and LSB at the two SOA facets are 6 and 2 dBm, respectively. The amplier driving current is set in the experiment at 160 mA. VI. EXTENSION TO 3-BIT OPERATION The basic scheme of the proposed binary-to-quaternary encoder (2-bit DAC) can be used to extend the operation to a higher number M of input bits to realize binary to M -ary encoding (log2 M -bit DAC). For instance, a possible scheme for 3-bit operation (3-bit DAC) could be implemented as shown in Fig. 7. Let us assume that bit#0 represents the LSB, whereas bit#2 is the MSB of the 3 bit-long binary word. With reference to the gure, let us also assume that the output of gate1 (representing the basic scheme of Fig. 1) is the binary-coded

quaternary signal providing the four possible combinations of the input signals bit#0 and bit#1. The output of gate1 is then sent a second gate (gate2) comprising a 1 2 all-optical switch (AOS) driven by bit#2. In this way, the output of gate1 can be deviated to OUT1 or OUT2 of gate2, depending on the value of bit#2. The AOS can be implemented, for instance, by exploiting XPR in a single SOA, or with two SOAs in a MachZehnder interferometer conguration (SOA-MZI). By means of VAs placed on the gate2 output paths, it is then possible to produce six different optical levels at the gate2 outputs, corresponding to the following bit combinations 001, 010, 011, 101, 110, 111, (with the rst digit of each word representing the MSB). Obviously, the case corresponding to the sequence 000 is also present at both the gate2 outputs. The level corresponding to the bit combination 100 can be generated by means of the SOA-based gate3 and gate4 of Fig. 7. In particular, gate3 has two input ports connected to bit#2 and bit#0, and one output port (via the OC) proportional to bit#2, which acts as a probe signal in the gate. On the other hand, bit#0 acts as a shutter for the gate being its power level high enough to completely saturate the amplier gain and suppress its output. Thus, gate3 represents the (bit#2) AND (NOT(bit#0)) logical operation. The output of gate3 is then sent as the probe signal to gate4, similar to gate3, except that the pump signal is bit#1. The output of gate3, OUT3 , is then (bit#2 AND (NOT(bit#0))) AND (NOT(bit#1)), and is thus, different from zero only for the sequence 100. By means of a VA at the output of gate3, it is possible then to generate the last level for the 2-to-8 ASK encoder. The various gate outputs for different input bit combination, and the corresponding output levels are summarized in Table III, where it can be seen that for any possible bit combination only one of the three gates outputs is different from zero, and the converted signal can thus be obtained by combining the three outputs. It can also be seen that, with proper settings of the VAs a binary-coded 8-level converted signal can be retrieved. Although a gray-coded converted signal is not possible with this architecture, the scheme of Fig. 6 employs only four active gates without probe beams, whereas in previously proposed phase control-free architecture for 3-bit operation the required number of active gates is seven [17] (with additional probe signal) and six [18] (without probe). Thus, the scheme of Fig. 7 represents a substantial reduction in terms of required active gates. Gray-code operation can be obtained by using the basic scheme of Fig. 1 at the expenses of increased active gates. It is also possible to demonstrate that, similarly to the approach

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of the scheme in Fig. 7, by opportunely combining different basic nonlinear gates, one can easily extend the operation to the desired number of input bits.

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VII. CONCLUSION We reported and demonstrated the operation of a novel architecture for performing all-optical XOR between data signals at the same wavelength by using a single semiconductor optical amplier, and no assist probe signal. Nonlinear effects are exploited to discriminate between the cases of single- and twopulses traveling the amplier, namely XGC, XPM, and XPR. Among the various effects, XPR is the most effective to this scope, since it allows to obtain the ultimate improvement of the output ER at the PBC output. However, due to the limited nonlinear interaction length of the two pulses in the counterpropagating architecture, we observed that XPR alone is not sufcient to produce a high-quality output signal. Thus, the role of XGC and spectral ltering is to produce a further amplitude reduction of the polarization-rotated pulses (although of less than 90 ). In this way, discrimination between the rotated and nonrotated pulses can be more easily accomplished at the output polarization shutter while keeping high the quality of the output signal. The scheme offers major simplications with respect to previously reported architectures in terms of reduced number of required signal sources and semiconductor optical ampliers. The BER measurements shows only 2 dB of power penalty for the XOR gate output data with respect to the input data. The scheme is expected to operate up to 40 Gb/s, being limited by the SOA length. Indeed, for correct operation of the proposed scheme, a pulse should enter the SOA with a certain delay after the counterpropagating bit of the previous period has left the amplier, being the additional delay equal to the gain recovery time of the amplier. Thus, assuming that the two input pulses enter the amplier simultaneously, the maximum bit rate is set by the propagation time in the amplier plus the recovery time of the gain. For 1.5 mm long ampliers with 15 ps of recovery time (like that used in our experiment), this corresponds to a maximum bit rate of about 30 Gb/s, whereas for 1-mm-long ampliers with 10 ps of recovery time, the maximum bit rate would be 50 Gb/s. For higher rate operation, a shorter and faster device should be used, which correspondingly would require a higher nonlinear device to maintain performances. The same proposed device also allows to perform binary-to-quaternary ASK format conversion (2-bit DAC) in the optical domain. Dynamic operation without phase control of the signals is demonstrated, for the rst time to our knowledge, at 10 Gb/s with a good quality of the level-converted output signal. A reduced complexity, in terms of active switches, number of OFs, and extra assist probe lights employed in the scheme is achieved with respect to previous 2-bit phase-control-free all-optical DAC experiments. Moreover, a possible architecture enabling extension to 3-bit operation is proposed with only four SOA-based nonlinear gates. Being based on semiconductor technology the scheme can be integrated, thus with a reduced footprint; nally, it requires moderate optical input power for both the proposed applications.

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Claudio Porzi received the M.Sc. degree in electronic engineering from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in telecommunications from the Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Pisa, Italy, in 2005. During 2004, he was with the Optoelectronics Research Center, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland, under a Marie Curie Fellowship. During 2005, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Agilent Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA. He is currently with the Integrated Research Center for Photonic Networks Technologies, Scuola Superiore SantAnna. He is the author or coauthor of more than 40 papers published in international journals and conference proceedings. His current research interests include the elds of all-optical processing, optical packet switching, and optical time-division multiplexed systems.

2002, he was a Visiting Researcher with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Tokyo, Japan, where he was engaged in ultrafast phase comparison for 160 GHz signals. In 2005, he started, together with two researchers, PhoTrix S.r. l., an Italian company producing pulsed ber lasers and ultrafast subsystems. He is currently the Head of Research with the CNIT and external collaborator for Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Excellence Center for Communication and Information Engineering, Pisa, Italy. He has published more than 150 international journal papers, conference papers, and patents. He was a Scientic Coordinator for the EU Project Large Optical Bandwidth by amplier Systems based on Tellurite bres doped with Rare earths. He was involved in several projects supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR) and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is currently managing the Italian national project Photonic Enabling Devices for Regeneration and Optical Switching supported by the MIUR. His current research interests include ultrafast communication systems and Optical Packet Switching networks. In 2001, his group demonstrated rst Italian transmission system working at 160 Gbit/s. For such purpose, strong expertise has been developed in ultrashort optical pulse generation for telecommunication.

Mirco Scaffardi was born in Parma, Italy, in 1975. He received the M.S. degree in electronics engineering from the University of Parma, Parma, Italy, in 2001 and the Ph.D. degree from the Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Pisa, Italy, in 2005. Since 2007, he is with the Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT), Pisa, where he was a Fellow with the National Photonic Networks Laboratory, in June 2001, and in May 2001, he collaborated on UE project Lobster. In 2004, he was a Visiting Student with the COM University of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark, and in 20072008, he was a Visiting Researcher with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Tokyo, Japan. His current research interests include the area of all-optical signal processing of photonic digital processing and ultrafast optical time-division multiplexed systems.

Antonella Bogoni was born in Mantova, Italy in 1972. She received the M.S. degree in electronics engineering, in 1997 and the Ph.D. degree, in 2004, both from University of Parma, Parma, Italy. From 1998 to 1999, she was a recipient of Grant of Marconi S.p.a. from the University of Parma. From 2000 to 2006, she was a Researcher with the Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT), Parma University, up to 2001, and then, with Photonic Networks National Laboratory, Pisa, Italy. She is currently the Head of Research with the CNIT, Integrated Research Center for Photonic Networks and Technologies. She was a Scientic Coordinator for National and EU Projects, and involved in several national and EU projects. She is coauthor of more than 50 papers on international journals, more than 150 contributes for international conferences, and 38 international patents. She participates to revision committees of international conferences and she is a Reviewer for international journals and for the European Commission within FP7. Her current research interests include the area of ber optical transmissions, especially in ultrafast all-optical signal processing and pulsed source generation.

Luca Pot` (M98) was born in Parma, Italy in 1971. He received the M.S. degree in electronics engineering from the University of Parma, Parma, Italy, in 1997. In 1997, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Centre dOptique, Photonique et Laser, Queb c, e Canada, where he was engaged in recirculating loop experiment for ultralong haul transmission. In 1998, he was with the Marconi Laboratory of Parma University, where he was involved in nonlinear effects due to bers and erbium-doped ber ampliers in wavelength-division multiplexing systems, for which he received a Marconi Communication Grant. From 1999 to 2000, he was engaged with the Optical Communications Laboratory, University of Parma. Since 2001, he was a Senior Researcher with Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT), Photonics Networks National Laboratory, Pisa, Italy. In