Electrical equivalent model for an optical VCO in a PLL synchronization scheme for ultrashort optical pulse sources

Abstract

The electrical modeling of complex electrooptical devices is a useful task for the correct design of its schemes and for the estimation of its performance. In this paper, we consider an electrooptical phase-locked loop (PLL) used to synchronize an RF system clock to the repetition rate of an optical pulsed source, realized by an active fiber mode-locking (ML) technique in the regenerative configuration. The synchronization scheme is suggested by a description of the pulsed source, for the first time, as an optical voltage-control oscillator (VCO). In particular, we present a simple new all-electrical model for the proposed optical VCO, and we verify its accuracy by the implementation of the whole PLL scheme at 2.5 and 10 GHz.