Repetition rate upgrade for optical sources

A novel method for the multiplication of the repetition rate of full duty-cycle return-to-zero optical sources is presented. It employs the memory property of a Fabry-Perot filter for the multiplication task, combined with the gain saturation of a semiconductor optical amplifier for amplitude equalization. This concept has been applied to quadruplicate the rate of a distributed feedback laser source operating at 10 GHz.