We investigate the performance of a large-scale, silica-on-silicon photonic integrated circuit for multiformat signal processing, and we experimentally demonstrate wavelength-conversion of (differential) quadrature phase-shift keying [(D)QPSK] signals. The circuit exploits phase-incoherent techniques to decode the input signal and to phase remodulate two phase-shift-keying components before combining them in a common QPSK output stream. Error-free wavelength conversion with 4-dB power penalty is reported at 44 Gb/s.

A novel architecture to enable future network security systems to provide effective protection in the context of continued traffic growth and the need to minimize energy consumption is proposed. It makes use of an all-optical prefiltering stage operating at the line rate under software control to distribute incoming packets to specialized electronic processors. An experimental system that integrates software controls and electronic interfaces with an all-optical pattern recognition system has demonstrated the key functions required by the new architecture. As an example, the ability to sort packets arriving in a 42.6 Gb/s data stream according to their service type was shown experimentally.

We demonstrate a large-scale silica-on-silicon photonic integrated circuit with 4 hybridly integrated SOAs for multi-format regeneration and wavelength conversion. Power penalty improvement up to 1.5dB is reported for degraded OOK and PSK signals.

Summary form only given. We describe recent advances in achieving high-speed circuit latency reduction by using SOAs as both the nonlinear element and as the feedback amplifier between all-optical gates. We also describe a novel configuration of SOA based logic gates to demonstrate high-speed XOR operation. In addition, we demonstrate a novel bit level synchronisation scheme that can be used to achieve the necessary retiming to enable precise temporal processing.