Optical clock recovery using SOA for relative timing extraction between counterpropagating short picosecond pulses

A technique that determines the relative arrival timing difference between two counterpropagating picosecond pulses in a nonlinear waveguide is presented. Optical clock recovery experiment constructed around a semiconductor optical amplifier demonstrates a recovered clock with less than 100 fs of jitter. The bit-error-rate measurement at 10 GHz, using 2/sup 31/-1 long pseudorandom bit sequence data, revealed error free operation.