Ultrahigh-speed clock recovery with phase lock loop based on four-wave mixing in a traveling-wave laser diode amplifier

A new phase lock loop (PLL) is proposed and demonstrated for clock recovery from an ultrahigh-speed time-division multiplexed (TDM) optical signal. A traveling-wave laser-diode amplifier (TW-LDA) is used as a phase detector, and the cross-correlation component between the optical signal and an optical clock pulse train is detected as a four-wave-mixing (FWM) signal generated in the TW-LDA. A timing clock from a TDM signal is extracted as a prescaled electrical clock, and this prescaled clock is directly recovered from a randomly modulated TDM optical signal. A prescaled 6.3 GHz clock is successfully extracted from a 100 Gb/s signal using the timing comparison output obtained as the cross-correlation between the optical signal and a short (<10 ps) 6.3 GHz optical clock pulse train in the generated FWM light. A comparison of the PLL phase noise with a previously reported gain modulation method is also shown, and the possibility of the Tbit/s operation of this PLL is also considered in the experiments.