Demonstration of 100 Gbit/s optical time‐division demultiplexing with 1‐to‐4 wavelength multicasting using the cascaded four‐wave mixing in photonic crystal fiber with a single control light source

Dispersion‐flattened highly nonlinear (DF‐HNL) photonic crystal fibers are useful for ultrafast optical signal processing. In this article, 100 Gbit/s‐to‐10 Gbit/s optical time demultiplexing with simultaneous 1‐to‐4 wavelength multicasting is successfully demonstrated by use of the cascaded four‐wave mixing (FWM) in a 50 m DF‐HNL photonic crystal fiber, for the first time. This scheme uses a single control‐pulse light source only and a simple architecture. The wavelength multicasting of the time‐demultiplexed optical signal is achieved on four wavelength channels of which two can have the minimum power penalty of 3.2 dB at 10 −9 bit error rate compared to the 10 Gbit/s back‐to‐back measurement. With the cascaded FWM, our proposed scheme can be used to improve the functionality of ultrahigh‐speed optical time‐division multiplexed systems/networks so as to support wavelength multicasting applications in a cost‐effective manner. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:2330–2335, 2014