Optical 3R regeneration using a single EAM for all-optical timing extraction with simultaneous reshaping and wavelength conversion

The authors demonstrate a technique that utilizes a single electro-absorption modulator (EAM) to perform simultaneous all-optical timing extraction, reshaping, and wavelength conversion. The extracted timing is used to generate an error signal that is used to recover the optical clock. The same EAM is used to encode the incoming data onto the retimed clock pulses in order to perform 311 regeneration and wavelength conversion. The system performance was tested using a 2(31) - 1 pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) data running at 10 Gb/s with a 3.3-ps pulsewidth. The input data was degraded by adding a 500-kHz timing jitter and reducing the optical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to 18 dB. The 311 regenerated data showed a 4.7-dB improvement in power penalty and 20-dB improvement in optical SNR. The calculated timing jitter of the recovered clock is less than 230 fs.