A 100-Gb/s noncoherent silicon receiver for PDM-DBPSK/DQPSK signals.

An integrated noncoherent silicon receiver for demodulation of 100-Gb/s polarization-division multiplexed differential quadrature phase-shift keying and polarization-division multiplexed differential binary phase-shift keying signals is demonstrated. The receiver consists of a 2D surface grating coupler, four Mach-Zehnder delay interferometers and four germanium balanced photodetectors.

All-optical binary counter based on semiconductor optical amplifiers.

A cascadable all-optical binary counter is demonstrated by using optical flip flops and logic gates based on semiconductor optical amplifiers. Two-bit counting operation as well as optical-frequency division at two different frequencies is presented. The proposed scheme is tunable in the entire C-band and can work at different counting rates without any reconfiguration. Performance evaluations in terms of Q factor confirm the effectiveness of the scheme in cascadable configurations. Counting-speed limitation is investigated, and photonic integration is identified as a feasible solution to increase the functioning rate beyond gigahertz.