Experimental demonstrations of all-optical conversions between the RZ and NRZ data formats incorporating noninverting wavelength shifting leading to format transparency

We demonstrate a unique semiconductor optical amplifier based system that performs the converting functions of: 1) RZ-to-NRZ; and 2) NRZ-to-RZ-to-NRZ by using noninverting cross-gain compression wavelength shifting. Our robust NRZ-to-RZ-to-NRZ reconverter was tested using 80 km of fiber and 4 EDFA's. We show that at 1-Gb/s, both functions can be realized with low power penalties (<2.0 dB).