Tunable All-Optical Wavelength Conversion of 160-Gb/s RZ Optical Signals by Cascaded SFG-DFG Generation in PPLN Waveguide

We report, for the first time, tunable all-optical wavelength conversion of 160-Gb/s return-to-zero (RZ) optical signals based on cascaded sum- and difference-frequency generation in a periodically poled LiNbO₃ waveguide. The distorted signals due to limited phase-matching bandwidth during conversion were compensated by spectral reshaping. We achieved error-free tunable wavelength conversion with a bit-error rate of less than 10^-9 for 160-Gb/s RZ signals in a 23-nm tuning range over the C-band