The ACTS project HIGHWAY (AC067) addresses promising ultra-high speed optoelectronic components and system technologies for 40 Gbit/s time-division-multiplexed (TDM) transport systems. Advanced 40 Gbit/s TDM system lab demonstrators are to be realized and tested over installed field fiber testbeds. This paper reviews the current status of 40 Gbit/s TDM components and subsystem technologies achieved in HIGHWAY. The results of HIGHWAY 40 Gbit/s TDM systems and field tests will be reported in a subsequent paper.

Summary form only given. Simultaneous all-optical add and drop multiplexing of a 40-Gbit/s OTDM signal using a monolithically integrated semiconductor optical amplifier/Mach Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI) is demonstrated. While maintaining a penalty of 1.3 dB for the add operation the sensitivity for the demultiplexed signal is -34.4 dBm.

A novel high-performance monolithic integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer with semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA's) in its arms has been realized and 80-Gb/s all-optical demultiplexing demonstrated. Penalty-free operation for 40-10 Gb/s demultiplexing has also been achieved. Dynamic range with respect to the input signal power for error-free operation at 40 Gb/s is more than 17 dB and fiber-to-fiber loss less than 2 dB. A theoretical model which takes into consideration amplifier gain dynamics and pulse propagation describes the demultiplexing experiments and predicts the device performances also at higher bit rates.

Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are very attractive for optical signal processing in WDM and OTDM networks due to their very fast and efficient interaction between optical input signals and the gain medium (carrier population)

The authors demonstrate an all-optical wavelength conversion technique that overcomes the carrier recovery time constraints of SOAs, enabling RZ output signals. Penalty-free conversion at 40 Gbit/s over 30 nm, with a monolithically integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer is demonstrated for the first time.

Error free 80-10 Gb/s all-optical demultiplexing is demonstrated using a monolithically integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) with SOAs. At 40 Gbit/s add-drop multiplexing, penalty-free demultiplexing and a large (>17 dB) dynamic range is demonstrated

Semiconductor lasers with short integrated mode expanders for efficient coupling to fiat-ended singlemode fibres are presented. Laser-to-fibre coupling efficiencies of –3 dB, an improvement of 7 dB compared with conventional laser diodes, have been achieved. Simultaneously, the lateral alignment tolerances, for a 1 dB reduction of the coupling efficiency have been relaxed to ±1.8 µm.