All-Optical Signal Processing Using Gain Clamped Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

All optical signal processing is a key functionality to ensure the operation and growth of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks. In this work we present a review of nonlinear applications of gain clamped semiconductor optical amplifiers (GC-SOA). An overview on recent results of wavelength conversion, signal reshaping, format conversion, and regeneration capabilities is presented; these results demonstrate promising characteristics of GC-SOA based schemes to enable transparent optical networks.