Crosstalk Investigation of an All-Optical Serial-to- Parallel Converter Based on the SMZ

In this paper an all-optical serial-to-parallel converter (SPC) based on the symmetric Mach-Zehnder (SMZ) interferometers operating at 80 Gb/s is presented. The proposed SPC is simulated and in particular its crosstalk (CXT) characteristics is investigated for a range of different system parameters such as signal and control pulse powers, delay time between the control pulses, and the main physical parameters of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). It is shown that CXT highly depends on the gain of the SMZ switching window and the difference in the gain profiles of SOAs in the gain recovery region. We show that there is a trade-off between the amount of CXT and the power level of the output signal. CXT of -20 dB is achieved at relatively low control power of ~20 mW.