Abstract

It is widely recognised that all-optical processing is the key to overcoming electronic bottle-necks in high-speed communication networks. Such systems, which are likely to include an abundance of fibre amplifiers, are still limited in performance by timing jitter (the Gordon-Haus effect¹) and signal to noise degradation due to the build up of amplified spontaneous emission. The use of all-optical signal regeneration to restore pulse timing and to remove noise and intensity fluctuations could therefore greatly extend the range and bit-rate of such a system. In this paper, we demonstrate experimentally a complete all-optical signal regenerator exploiting a novel method of all-optical clock recovery² and a nonlinear loop mirror³. We show that the regenerated data has less intensity variation and less temporal jitter than the incoming data.

© 1993 Optical Society of America