All-Optical OC-192 RZ data decision gating in dark optical comb injected semiconductor optical amplifier

Abstract

We demonstrate a novel all-optical RZ decision gate by using one dark-optical-comb injected SOA which is controlled by a reshaped optical clock with extremely high cross-gain-modulation (XGM) depth and narrow gain window. Such a decision gate exhibits improved 3R regeneration performances including timing tolerance of 33.5 ps, Q factor of 8.1 and extinction ratio of 13.6 dB. The correlation between backward injected dark-comb and input data wavelength region for optimizing the extinction ratio of the decision gated RZ data is determined. Under a threshold operating dark-optical comb power of 7 dBm, such a decision gate can recover the degraded RZ data with a bit-error-rate of less than 10(-9) at 10 Gbits/s.