All-Optical Clock Recovery Using a Single Fabry–Perot Semiconductor Optical Amplifier

Abstract

We present and demonstrate all-optical clock recovery (CR) from the input single- and multiwavelength return-to-zero (RZ) data, using a single multiquantum-well Fabry-Perot semiconductor optical amplifier (FP-SOA) with no additional amplitude equalization measures. The influence of the FP-SOA facet reflectivity on the amplitude equalization of the recovered clock was numerically investigated. A stable 36.55 GHz optical clock with an extinction ratio of 11.0 dB and a root-mean-square timing jitter of 575 fs was extracted from the input, which consisted of pseudorandom binary sequences of RZ data. The presented scheme has the potential to perform CR from more than 100 Gbit/s of RZ data, and it has the advantage of wideband and parallel operation.