Simultaneous clock recovery and demultiplexing of a 320 Gb/s OTDM system using an optoelectronic oscillator based on cascaded MZM and PolM

An improved optoelectronic oscillator scheme for an optical time division multiplexing(OTDM) system based on cascaded Mach-Zehnder modulator(MZM) and polarization modulator(PolM) is experimentally investigated.The system can simultaneously realize clock recovery and demultiplexing.With the MZM working at peak point to generate return-to-zero-33 optical pulses and the PolM working as an equivalent intensity modulator,a high-quality clock signal with 35-fs timing jitter is extracted from the 160-GBaud OTDM-differential quaternary phase-shift keying signal.Narrow short optical switch gates(4 ps) are also generated to demultiplex 160-GBaud signals to 40-GBaud signals.Error-free performance is achieved with 2.4-dB power penalty in the worst case.