Subharmonic optical clock recovery from 160 Gb/s using time-dependent loss saturation inside a single electroabsorption modulator

A single electroabsorption modulator (EAM) is utilized to perform subharmonic all-optical timing extraction from 160 Gb/s. The extraction technique is based on fast time-dependent loss saturation inside the EAM. The extracted timing is used for optical clock recovery with /spl les/340 fs of timing jitter. The clock recovery technique is bit-rate flexible, and the bit-error-ratio measurements reveal an error-free operation with no receiver sensitivity penalty.