Analysis of a time-lens based optical frame synchronizer and retimer for 10G Ethernet aiming at a Tb/s optical router/Switch design

This paper analyzes experimentally and by numerical simulations an optical frame retimer and synchronizer unit for 10 Gbit/s Ethernet input frames. The unit is envisaged to be applied in the design of an optically transparent router for Optical Time Division Multiplexed (OTDM) links, aggregating traffic from several 10 Gbit/s Ethernet (10 GE) links. The scheme is based on time-lenses implemented through a combination of a sinusoidally driven optical phase modulation and linear dispersion. Our analysis extracts the operation range of the scheme used for synchronization and retiming in the context of 10 Gbit/s Ethernet, considering the frequency offset to the local clock within the specified standard tolerance (i.e. ± 1 MHz for 10 Gbit/s Ethernet) and the Ethernet frame size (i.e. up to 1526 bytes). We also provide preliminary design insights to increase the operation range.