Retiming of Short Pulses Using Quadratic Cascading in a Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate Waveguide

We demonstrate an all-optical technique for the mitigation of timing jitter in short pulse transmission systems. The technique relies on pulse preshaping followed by optical switching in a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide via cascaded second harmonic and difference frequency generation. The original data pulses are shaped into flat-top pulses to avoid conversion of their timing jitter into pulse amplitude noise at the output of the waveguide. Pulse retiming is confirmed by temporal measurements, while bit-error-rate measurements confirm good noise performance for the system.