Data Erasing and Rewriting Capabilities of a Colorless FPLD Based Carrier-Reusing Transmitter

The inherent data-erasing functionality of a 10-Gb/s colorless Fabry-Pérot laser diode (FPLD) wavelength controlled by reusing a downstream optical carrier with encoded data is explored. By operating the injection-locked colorless FPLD at high dc bias, the unique in situ data-erasing mechanism is attributed to the almost identical power-to-current slope, regardless of optical injection-locking level. When reusing the downstream carrier, the injection-locked upstream colorless FPLD can significantly suppress the extinction ratio of the residual 10-Gb/s downstream data from 7.1 to <; 1 dB. This facilitates direct reuse of the downstream carrier without the need for an additional data eraser. With the data-erasing capability under 0-dBm injection, the carrier-reused upstream transmission successfully delivers on-off keying data up to 10 Gb/s with a signal-to-noise ratio of 6.2 dB and an extinction ratio of 5.4 dB. Even with a downstream injection power value of only -9 dBm, the upstream bit error rate (BER) of such a dual functional colorless FPLD biased at ≥2I
_th
indicates a BER of <; 1 × 10
^-10
. This releases the typical demand on high power budget requested for downstream data transmission and carrier reusing. The large parametric tolerances of such a data-erasable and carrier-reusable colorless FPLD transmitter also facilitate its practical application in dense-wavelength-division multiplexed passive optical networks.