Ultra-low timing jitter 40 Gb/s clock recovery using a novel electroabsorption-modulator-based self-starting optoelectronic oscillator

This paper demonstrates a novel scheme to simultaneously extract, with error free performance, both the electrical and the optical clocks of 10 GHz-rate from either a single-channel 10 Gb/s RZ data stream or a four-channel 40 Gb/s OTDM stream for demultiplexing purposes. The scheme utilizes a new type of self-starting electroabsorption-modulator (EAM)-based optoelectronic oscillator (EAM-OEO). The EAM-OEO utilizes a fiber-extended optoelectronic cavity to simultaneously generate a 10 GHz-rate stream of short optical pulses with the lowest timing jitter reported to-date for self-starting pulse sources and a corresponding low-phase-noise 10 GHz electrical signal. The use of EAM-OEO for clock recovery can be easily scaled to 160 Gb/s or higher data rates by utilizing 40 GHz-bandwidth EAM and other components in the optoelectronic cavity.