Dependence of frequency chirping on bias current in LD wavelength conversion

Chirping influence is experimentally studied in wavelength conversion using a light injected DFB-LD. It is shown that signal degradation due to frequency chirping is small when the bias current is large and the relaxation oscillation frequency is high. An experiment demonstrates that 5-Gb/s wavelength converted light at 1.55 μm is transmitted through 160-km nondispersion-shifted fiber with 2-dB penalty, which is only 0.5 dB larger than that in transmission using a LiNbO3Mach-Zehnder modulator.