Novel optical-regenerator using electroabsorption modulators

We have proposed and demonstrated a novel optical regenerator architecture employing electroabsorption modulators as wavelength converters. The employment of EA modulators is advantageous for high-speed operation and flexibility in the bit-rate for the pulse regeneration. In addition, the EA modulator-wavelength-converter acts also as a photo diode for clock extraction. Compensation of the optical SNR and Q-factor has been demonstrated, even in cascaded noise load. Furthermore, against dispersion loading, we have confirmed that waveform recovery and Q-factor improvement is obtained by midway insertion of the optical regenerator. The proposed architecture will offer a wide-band-electronics-free optical regenerator in multi-tens of gigabit per second WDM networks.