Investigation of optical clock division and demultiplexing based on a commercial lithium niobate‐intensity modulator

Abstract

AbstractWe demonstrate and investigate a simple technique to realize multichannel optical clock division by using a commercial lithium niobate‐intensity modulator (LN‐IM). Optical clock division is achieved by controlling the driving and dc bias voltage of the LN‐IM. 20‐ to 10‐GHz optical clock division experiments of both single and double channel are implemented to verify the performance of the proposed optical clock divider. The phase noise of the extracted 10‐GHz optical clock is less than 95 dBc/Hz. The other function of this technique, demultiplexing of optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) signal is also demonstrated experimentally. The 20‐Gb/s PRBS OTDM signal is successfully demultiplexed to two 10 Gb/s with high quality. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:94–99, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.26477