Optical header recognition using time stretch preprocessing

We propose and demonstrate the time stretch optical header recognition technique where a high speed header is extracted and slowed down by more than an order of magnitude, in optical domain, to facilitate the capture and processing in electronic domain. The technique can be implemented in continuous time or discrete time. Both implementations are experimentally demonstrated for stretching a 10 Gb/s header by a factor of 20. Eye diagrams and Q values are generated to evaluate the quality of stretched headers. While both implementations are capable of slowing down the header bit rate, each method has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of bandwidth, maximum header length, latency, and sensitivity to the sampling clock jitter. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.