Optical Noise Tolerance in a Polarization-, Wavelength-, and Filter-Free All-Optical Clock Recovery System Based on a Monolithic Mode-Locked Laser

We experimentally investigated optical noise tolerance of a polarization-, wavelength-, and filter-free all-optical clock recovery system based on a monolithic mode-locked laser diode. The results showed that for input signal degradation, the jitter of the recovered clock did not degrade to approximately 8 dB/nm of the optical SNR. We also compared the clock recovery performance as functions of the wavelength and the modulation format (on-off keying and phase-shift keying) of the input data signals. We revealed that no significant changes were measured in the clock recovery performance despite such changes in the parameters of the input data signals, indicating that noise-tolerable clock recovery is expected, retaining the polarization- and the filter-free operations, regardless of the wavelength and the modulation format of the input data signals, by using our new scheme.