Optical 3R regeneration of 40 Gbit/s degraded data signals

A 40 Gbit/s optical 3R regenerator is proposed and demonstrated. The 3R regenerator consists of a dual-ring injection mode-locked fiber ring laser as the clock recovery module and an electroabsorption modulator (EAM) as the decision gate. The clock recovery module extracts the optical short pulse clock with low timing jitter from degraded 40 Gbit/s optical data streams, while the decision gate restores their signal quality. A numerical model describing the cross-absorption modulation effect in a bulk EAM is developed to explore the operating conditions, such as bias voltage, pump signal power. The timing jitter tolerance for the EAM optical gate is also investigated. Significantly improvement of BER is obtained from 40 Gbit/s RZ signals which are degraded by polarization mode dispersion or chromatic dispersion.