Optical Pulse Generation Based on an Optoelectronic Oscillator With Cascaded Nonlinear Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

Author

Ningbo Huang ; Ming Li ; Ye Deng ; Ning Hua Zhu

Author_Institution

State Key Lab. on Integrated Optoelectron., Inst. of Semicond., Beijing, China

Volume

6

Issue

1

fYear

2014

fDate

Feb. 2014

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

8

Abstract

This paper presents a high-repetition-rate pulse train generator incorporating an optoelectronic oscillator based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The optoelectronic oscillator is used to generate a high-stability microwave signal, by which an optical pulse train is generated using FWM effect in cascaded SOAs. The key feature of this work is that no external microwave signal source is needed for generating an optical pulse train. An optical pulse train with a repetition rate of 10 GHz and a pulsewidth of 19 ps is experimentally generated. The pulsewidth and the repetition rate can be tunable and are experimentally demonstrated.

Keywords

microwave photonics; multiwave mixing; optical pulse generation; oscillators; semiconductor optical amplifiers; FWM; cascaded SOA; cascaded nonlinear semiconductor optical amplifiers; four-wave mixing; frequency 10 GHz; high-repetition-rate pulse train generator; high-stability microwave signal; optical pulse generation; optoelectronic oscillator; pulsewidth; time 19 ps; Nonlinear optics; Optical fibers; Optical filters; Optical polarization; Optical pulses; Semiconductor optical amplifiers; Pulse generation; four-wave mixing; optoelectronic oscillator; semiconductor optical amplifiers;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Photonics Journal, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1943-0655

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/JPHOT.2014.2304552

Filename

6731528