Multifunctional Optoelectronic Oscillator Based on Cascaded Modulators

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a multifunctional optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) mainly composed of a phase modulator in tandem with a dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator. Simultaneous operations of low-phase-noise ultra-flat optical frequency comb (OFC) generation, prescaled electrical clock (EC) recovery, and error-free fourfold demultiplexing of an injected 4 × 25-Gb/s optical time-division multiplexing differential phase-shift keying signal are achieved with the proposed OEO. The generated nine-tone OFC has a flatness within 0.7 dB. The timing jitters of optical and EC signals are 117 and 112 fs, respectively.