Reshaping capability of cross-gain compression in semiconductor amplifiers

We introduce and experimentally demonstrate a novel scheme for all-optical regeneration. We exploit the reshaping properties of cross-gain compression between two logically inverted signals in a gain-saturated semiconductor optical amplifier. This technique performs wavelength-preserving signal reshaping and produces, as an additional output, a wavelength-converted copy of the input signal. We report experimental results showing apparent improvement of the eye diagrams and of the bit-error rate for degraded 10-Gb/s signals.