All-Optical 160-Gbit/s Retiming System Using Fiber Grating Based Pulse Shaping Technology

This paper demonstrates a retiming system operating at rates of 40 and 160 Gbit/s, which incorporates a superstructured fiber Bragg grating (SSFBG) as a pulse shaping element. The original data pulses are shaped into flat-topped (rectangular) pulses to avoid conversion of their timing jitter into pulse amplitude noise at the output of a nonlinear fiber-based Kerr switch. Thus retiming is performed in a single step avoiding wavelength conversion. The benefits of using shaped rather than conventional pulse forms in terms of timing jitter reduction are confirmed by bit-error rate (BER) measurements.