Preprocessing-Free All-Optical Clock Recovery from NRZ and NRZ-DPSK Signals Using an FP-SOA Based Active Filter

We demonstrate a simple scheme to perform all-optical clock recovery from the input nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and nonreturn-to-zero differential phase shifted keying (NRZ-DPSK) data, which are avoided using any preprocessing measures. A multi-quantum-well Fabry-Pérot semiconductor optical amplifier plays the dual role of the data format converter and the clock recovery device. Using this scheme, a stable and low jitter 35.80-GHz optical clock pulse sequence is directly extracted out from the input NRZ or NRZ-DPSK data. This scheme has some distinct advantages such as simple device fabrication, transparence to data format, multiwavelength operation, free preprocessing and convenient tuning. Potential powerful adaptability of this scheme is very important for next-generation optical networks, in which there exist various modulation formats and the used devices are required to be transparent to data formats.