Recent Progress on Optical Regeneration of Wavelength-Division-Multiplexed Data

Practical applications of all-optical regeneration require from it a graceful scalability with the number of wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) channels. We describe several main approaches to WDM-compatible regeneration and review in greater detail two recent demonstrations of 16-channel regeneration: one using time-lensing and the other using group-delay-management. We discuss scalability, practical issues, and outlook for these WDM regeneration methods.

I. Introduction

Optical regeneration of data signals has been a topic of research for several decades. The prospect of having an optically transparent way of improving signal quality rather than using high-speed electrical discriminators has intrigued researchers resulting in numerous interesting propositions on how to solve this challenge.