Additive noise and jitter performance analysis of passive optical interferometers operated at ultrahigh rates

In this paper, we theoretically associate the additive noise, the amplitude jitter and the timing jitter at the input and output of passive optical interferometers. We make use of the theoretical results to assess the noise and jitter performance of interferometer based applications such as pulse repetition frequency multiplication and clock recovery. We show that, for both applications, interferometers may successfully reduce the noise and the jitter existing in the input signals, and thus yield very high quality output signals. Furthermore, we focus on the practical aspects of deploying Fabry-Peacuterot interferometers in rate multipliers and clock recoveries, and provide rules for selecting the characteristics of the Fabry-Peacuterot interferometer to meet specific quality requirements for the output signal