Low timing jitter 40 Gb/s all-optical clock recovery based on an amplified feedback laser diode

We demonstrate 40 Gb/s all-optical clock recovery by using a monolithic integrated amplified-feedback laser (AFL) with coherent injection-locked method. The AFL consists of a gain-coupled DFB laser and an optical amplified feedback external cavity. With proper design and operation of AFL, the device can work at self-pulsation state that resulted from the beating between two lasing modes. The self-pulsation can be injection-locked to the optical clock embedded in input data streams. Due to different work mechanisms, there are two all-optical clock recovery operation modes: incoherent injection-locked and coherent injection-locked. It's predicted that the coherent injection method has various advantages: 1) requiring low injection power recovery, 2) independent of the bit rate and 3) introducing little timing jitter to the recovered clock. The robustness of coherent clock recovery is confirmed by our experimental results. We set up a return-to- zero (RZ) pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) data streams all-optical clock recovery system. This coherent injection-locked based clock recovery method is optical signal noise ratio (OSNR) and chromatic dispersion (CD) degeneration tolerant, and has low timing jitter and high sensitivity.