Optical conversion between time and space domain parallelism

摘要

The existing mismatch between the bandwidth capacity of optical fiber and electronic devices, can be used to increase the speed, provide security and reliability in the transmission and distribution of information. To implement these applications, all-op0tical multiplexer performing space-to-time (i.e., Parallel-to-serial) transformation at the transmitter and demultiplexer performing time-to-space (i.e., serial-to-parallel) transformation at the receiver will need to be constructed. For efficient bandwith utilization, these processors need to be operated at rates determined by the bandwidth of the optical pulses. Ultrashort pulse laser technology has recently experimenced significant advances, producing high peak power waveforms of optical radiation in the femtosecond duration rage. These ultrafast waveforms can be synthesized and processed in the temporal frequency domain by spatially dispersing the frequency components in a spectral processing device (SPD) and performing operations on the spectrally decomposed wave (SDW). Sapce-to-time multiplexing via waveform synthesis using SDW filtering has been demonstrated with prefabricated masks, spatial light modulators and holograms. These filter are limited in their adaptability rat-a new filter can be implemented only as fast as the modulator response time of rcording time of a new hologram-typically well over microsecond.