Experimental Study of Pattern-Independent Phase Noise Accumulation in an All-Optical Clock Recovery Chain Based on Two-Section Gain-Coupled DFB Lasers

The pattern-independent phase noise accumulation in a chain of all-optical clock recovery devices (CRDs) based on two-section gain-coupled distributed feedback (TS-DFB) laser operating in the coherent mode is studied experimentally and theoretically. A simple theoretical model, where the CRD output phase noise is equal to the sum of the phase noise introduced by the CRD and the CRD input phase noise filtered by the phase noise transfer function, has been proposed for the CRD equivalent phase noise model. The accumulation of pattern-independent phase noise is investigated experimentally and theoretically for different cut-off frequencies of the phase noise transfer function of the TS-DFB laser and two different optical signal to noise ratios. It is shown that, due to the phase noise added by the CRD, phase noise accumulates in the passband of the phase noise transfer function, with the phase noise transfer function well approximated by a first-order lowpass filter. Excellent qualitative agreement between the experimental results and the theoretical model is observed. Also, it is concluded that the phase noise accumulation model for CRD, where the recovered clock is locked to the optical power of the incoming clock signal, presented by other authors holds in a qualitative point of view for the TS-DFB laser operating in the coherent mode. Since the root-mean-square (rms) of the timing jitter is proportional to the square root of the integrated power spectral density of the phase noise, the results show that a smaller cut-off frequency of the phase noise transfer function does not lead to a smaller rms value of the pattern-independent timing jitter along the chain of all-optical CRDs based on TS-DFB laser. It is shown that the minimum rms of the pattern-independent timing jitter along the CRD chain results from a compromise between the cut-off frequency of the phase noise transfer function and the phase noise introduced by the TS-DFB laser.