All optical LTI systems

Abstract

With the emergence of bandwidth extensive communication demands, optical fiber communications arises as a suitable (and natural) solution. But with the wide bandwidth of the optical fibers, signal processing speed should exceed today's maximum electronic rates by about four orders of magnitude to be well utilized. In this paper, we describe a solution for the problem which is an all-optical discrete-time linear-time-invariant signal processor that can be reconfigured by an electronic microprocessor that gives it the flexibility and high speed. We first describe the basic idea and components of the processor, then we show its importance in optical communications such as in OCDM, OTDM, frequency-domain filtering within the same wavelength and dispersion equalization.