Wavelength conversion offers several attractive features when used along with WDM techniques. Four-wave mixing (FWM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) seems to be a promising wavelength conversion technique for all-optical networks due to its high tunability and transparency to modulation format and bit-rate. The drawback of this technique is that the output power and signal-to-noise ratio are usually strongly dependent on the frequency shift. The broad-band orthogonal pumps (BOP) FWM is an improved scheme with wider tuning range and a more uniform conversion efficiency. However, two wavelength-tunable external pump sources are generally needed to achieve conversion with BOP FWM. Recently, techniques for eliminating one of the two external pumps or even all the external pumps have been proposed, but they usually require complex setups. In this paper, we present a new BOP FWM architecture, without external pumps with only a unique fiber ring cavity, a Bragg grating structure (FBGS) written in high-birefringence fiber (HiBi) and a commercial SOA.
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