Effect of timing jitter on an optically controlled picosecond optical switch

Timing jitter between optical control and signal pulses seriously degrades the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of optically controlled optical switches in the picosecond region. BER's measured in a picosecond all-optical switch based on nonlinear fiber Sagnac interferometer switching reveal that the rms signal-to-control timing jitter must be less than 1/12 of the switching window to achieve BER < 10−9.