Investigation into the feasibility of using an EA modulator as a demultiplexer in a 16 channel OTDM system

We demonstrate that by driving an electroabsorption modulator with a combination of 2.5 GHz and 10 GHz RF signals it is possible to reduce the duty cycle to as little as 3.5%, making it feasible to use just one device to demultiplex a single 2.5 Gbit/s channel from a 16 channel OTDM data stream. We show that in fact the modulator used in our experiments was capable of demultiplexing single channels from total data rates in excess of 50 Gbit/s, and note that it may be possible to further reduce the duration of the transmission window through the addition of higher harmonic electrical signals, subject to the material and packaging limitations of the EA modulators.