The hybrid electrical/optical multi-chip integration technique for optical modules for optical network system has been developed. Employing the technique, a 44 broadcast-and-select type optical matrix switch module has been realized. The module consists of four sets of silica waveguide 1 : 4 splitters/4 : 1 combiners, four 4-channel arrays of polarization insensitive semiconductor optical amplifiers with spot-size converters as optical gates, printed wiring chips for electrical wiring and single mode fibers for optical signal interface on planar waveguide platform fabricated by atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition. All the gates and the wiring chips were mounted precisely onto the platform at once in flip-chip manner by self-align technique using AuSn solder bumps. Coupling loss between the waveguide and the SOA gate was estimated to be 4.5 dB. Averaged fiber-to-fiber signal gain, on-off ratio and polarization dependent loss for each of the signal paths was 7 dB 2 dB, more than 40 dB and 0.5 dB, respectively. High speed 10 Gb/s photonic cell switching as short as 2 nsec has been successfully achieved.

As a low-cost optical transceiver for access network systems, we propose a new monolithic transceiver photonic integrated circuit (PIC) fabricated by bandgap energy controlled selective metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE). In the PIC, all optical components are monolithically integrated. Thus, the number of optical alignment points is significantly reduced and the assembly costs of the module is decreased compared to those of hybrid modules, that use silica waveguides. Moreover, by using selective MOVPE, extremely low-loss buried heterostructure waveguides can be fabricated without any etching. In-plane bandgap energy control is also possible, allowing the formation of active and passive core layers simultaneously without complicated fabrication. The transceiver PIC showed fiber-coupled output power of more than 1 mW and receiver bandwidth of 7 GHz. Modulation and detection operations at 500 Mb/s were also demonstrated. As a cost effective fabrication technique for monolithic PICs, bandgap energy controlled selective MOVPE is a promising candidate.

A new boundary integral formulation is presented in order to solve a general Laplace-Poisson's equation, which is one of the basic equations of semiconductor devices. As this formulation is based on Green's second identity or Gauss' divergence theorem, no conventional volume integral is needed, regardless of arbitrary distributions of space charge. The potentials and electric field intensities at interface nodes put between a Laplace and a Poisson domain are analytically calculated, because interface nodes are treated as same as internal points. It is effective and powerful to device analysis of such a junction-gate field effect transistor with interfaces movable according to operation bias conditions. On the basis of simple numerical experiments, the present method is applied to a simplified device models. It is shown that device analysis can be easily obtained for a more small discretized model. In consequence, numerical results also demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Spot-size-converter integrated semiconductor optical amplifiers have been developed as gate elements for optical switch matrices. An S-shape waveguide has been introduced to prevent re-coupling of unguided light to the output fiber. An angled-facet structure effectively suppressed light reflection at the end facets. Consequently, a high extinction ratio of 70 dB and a high fiber-to-fiber gain of 20 dB were achieved. Sufficient optical coupling characteristics to a flat-ended single-mode fiber with a coupling loss of 3.5 dB were also demonstrated.

Different-wavelength distributed feedback laser diodes with integrated modulators (DFB/MODs) are fabricated on a single wafer operate at wavelengths from 1. 52 µm to 1. 59 µm, a range comparable to the expanded Er-doped fiber amplifier gain band. A newly developed field-size-variation electron-beam lithography enables grating pitch to be controlled to within 0. 0012 nm, and narrow-stripe selective metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy is used to control the bandgap wavelength of laser active layers and modulator absorption layers for each channel. The channel spacing of fabricated 40-channel DFB/MODs is 214 GHz in average with a standard deviation of 0. 39 nm. Very uniform lasing and modulating performances are achieved, such as threshold currents about 10 mA and extinction ratios about 20 dB at -2 V in average. These devices have been used to demonstrate 2. 5-Gb/s transmission over 600 km of a normal fiber with a power penalty of less than 1 dB.

Various types of wavelength-selectable light sources (WSLs) and wavelength-tunable laser diodes (LDs) have been developed, and the one based on an array of distributed feedback (DFB) laser diodes (LDs) has the advantage of tuning that is both simple and stable tuning. It requires only the selection of a DFB-LD and a temperature control. We report on monolithically integrated WSLs with a DFB-LD array, multimode interference (MMI) coupler, semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), and electro-absorption (EA) modulator. To make them compact, we introduced microarray structures and to ensure that they were easy to fabricate, we used selective area growth. For the WSL with an integrated EA modulator, we developed a center-temperature-shift method that optimizes the detuning wavelength between the lasing wavelength and the absorption edge wavelength of the EA-modulator. Using this method, we obtained a uniform extinction ratio and were able to demonstrate error-free 2.5-Gb/s transmission over a 600-km fiber span. A CW-WSL without an EA-modulator should provide enough output power to compensate the loss caused by the external modulators, but the high-power operation of a CW-WSL is sensitive to optical feedback from the front facet. We therefore used an angled facet in our WSLs and eliminated a mode hop problem. More than 20 mW of fiber-coupled power was obtained over 23 ITU-T channels on a 50-GHz grid.

The hybrid electrical/optical multi-chip integration technique for optical modules for optical network system has been developed. Employing the technique, a 44 broadcast-and-select type optical matrix switch module has been realized. The module consists of four sets of silica waveguide 1 : 4 splitters/4 : 1 combiners, four 4-channel arrays of polarization insensitive semiconductor optical amplifiers with spot-size converters as optical gates, printed wiring chips for electrical wiring and single mode fibers for optical signal interface on planar waveguide platform fabricated by atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition. All the gates and the wiring chips were mounted precisely onto the platform at once in flip-chip manner by self-align technique using AuSn solder bumps. Coupling loss between the waveguide and the SOA gate was estimated to be 4.5 dB. Averaged fiber-to-fiber signal gain, on-off ratio and polarization dependent loss for each of the signal paths was 7 dB 2 dB, more than 40 dB and 0.5 dB, respectively. High speed 10 Gb/s photonic cell switching as short as 2 nsec has been successfully achieved.

Symmetric Mach-Zehnder (SMZ) type all-optical swit-ches are discussed. The SMZ type all-optical switches feature the so-called differential phase modulation scheme to achieve a speed unrestricted by efficient, thus usually slow nonlinearities. In these switches, semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are often used to realize low optical power switching. We discussed SOAs from a view point of all-optical switch applications, rather than amplifier applications. Finally, all-optical signal processing experiments are discussed with the SMZ type all-optical switches. These include ultrafast demultiplexing of 336 Gb/s signal pulses and random operations at 42 Gb/s for all-optical logic operation and wavelength conversion.

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are required for future optical communication systems, because various optical components need to be compactly integrated in one-chip configurations with a small number of optical alignment points. Bandgap energy controlled selective metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) is a breakthrough technique for the fabrication of PICs because this technique enables the simultaneous formation of waveguides for various optical components in one-step growth. Directly formed waveguides on a mask-patterned substrate can be obtained without using conventional mesa-etching of the semiconductor layers. The waveguide width is precisely controlled by the mask pattern. Therefore, high device uniformity and yield are expected. Since we proposed and demonstrated this technique in 1991, various PICs have been reported. Using electroabsorption modulator integrated distributed feedback laser diodes, 2.5 Gb/s-550 km transmission experiments have been successfully conducted. Another advantage of the selective MOVPE technique is the capability to form narrow waveguide layers. We have demonstrated a polarization-insensitive semiconductor optical amplifier that consists of a selectively formed narrow (less than 1 µm wide) bulk active layer. For a four-channel array, a chip gain of more than 20 dB and a gain difference between TE and TM inputs of less than 1 dB were obtained. We have also reported an optical switch matrix and an optical transceiver PIC for access optical networks. By using a low-loss optical waveguide, a 0 dB fiber-to-fiber gain for the 14 switch matrix and 0 dBm fiber output power from the 1.3 µm transceiver PIC were obtained. In this paper, the selective MOVPE technique and its applications to various kinds of PICs are discussed.

Control scheme for accurately optimizing (and also automatically stabilizing) the interferometer phase bias of Symmetric-Mach-Zehnder (SMZ)-type ultrafast all-optical switches is proposed. In this control scheme, a weak cw light is used as a supervisory input light and its spectral power ratio at the switch output is used as a bipolar error signal. Our experimental result at 168-Gb/s 16:1 demultiplexing with a hybrid-integrated SMZ switch indicates the feasibility and the sensitivity of this control scheme.

Spot-size-converter integrated semiconductor optical amplifiers have been developed as gate elements for optical switch matrices. An S-shape waveguide has been introduced to prevent re-coupling of unguided light to the output fiber. An angled-facet structure effectively suppressed light reflection at the end facets. Consequently, a high extinction ratio of 70 dB and a high fiber-to-fiber gain of 20 dB were achieved. Sufficient optical coupling characteristics to a flat-ended single-mode fiber with a coupling loss of 3.5 dB were also demonstrated.

Kakuro is a popular logic puzzle, in which a player fills in all empty squares with digits from 1 to 9 so that the sum of digits in each (horizontal or vertical) line is equal to a given number, called a clue, and digits in each line are all different. In 2016, Bultel, Dreier, Dumas, and Lafourcade proposed a physical zero-knowledge proof protocol for Kakuro using a deck of cards; their proposed protocol enables a prover to convince a verifier that the prover knows the solution of a Kakuro puzzle without revealing any information about the solution. One possible drawback of their protocol would be that the protocol is not perfectly extractable, implying that a prover who does not know the solution can convince a verifier with a small probability; therefore, one has to repeat the protocol to make such an error become negligible. In this paper, to overcome this, we design zero-knowledge proof protocols for Kakuro having perfect extractability property. Our improvement relies on the ideas behind the copy protocols in the field of card-based cryptography. By executing our protocols with a real deck of physical playing cards, humans can practically perform an efficient zero-knowledge proof of knowledge for Kakuro.

A newly developed hybrid-integrated Symmetric Mach-Zehnder (HI-SMZ) all-optical switch is reported. For integration, we chose the Symmetric Mach-Zehnder (SMZ) structure rather than the Polarization-Discriminating Symmetric Mach-Zehnder (PD-SMZ) structure which is similar to SMZ but more often used in experiments using discrete optical components. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of SMZ and PD-SMZ to show that SMZ is more suitable for integration. We also discuss about the use of SOAs as nonlinear elements for all-optical switches. We conclude that, although the ultrafast switching capability of SMZ is limited by the gain compression of SOAs, the very low switching energy is more important for practical devices. We then describe the HI-SMZ all-optical switch. This integration scheme has advantages which include low loss, low dispersion silica waveguides for high speed operation and ease in large scale integration of many SMZs with other optical, electrical, and opto-electrical devices. We show that a very high dynamic extinction ratio is possible with HI-SMZ. We also examine HI-SMZ with 1 ps pulses to show its ultrafast capability. Finally, we describe a 168 to 10.5 Gbps error-free demultiplexing experiment which is to our best knowledge the fastest experiment with an integrated device.