All-Optical Decision-Gating of 10-Gb/s RZ Data in a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier Temporally Gain-Shaped With Dark-Optical-Comb

We demonstrate a novel all-optical noninverted OC-192 return-to-zero (RZ) decision-gate by using a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) which is gain-controlled to achieve an extremely high cross-gain-modulation depth and a narrow gain window. A dark-optical-comb generated by reshaping the optical clock RZ data in a Mach-Zehnder intensity modulator is employed as an injecting source to temporally deplete most of the gain in the SOA. Such a dark-optical-comb injected SOA decision-gate exhibits improved 3R regeneration performances such as a timing tolerance of 33.5 ps, Q -factor of 8.1, an input dynamical tolerance of 14 dB, and an extinction ratio (ER) of 14 dB. The deviation between the wavelengths of backward injected dark-optical-comb and input RZ data for optimizing the ER of the decision-gate is determined as Deltalambda=19 nm. Under a threshold operating dark-optical-comb power of 7 dBm, such a decision-gate can recover the -18.5-dBm degraded RZ data with a bit-error-rate of less than at 10^-9 Gb/s. A negative power penalty of -4.2 dB is demonstrated for the RZ data after 50-km propagation and decision gating.