Demonstration of Optical 3R Regenerator for 10 Gb/s NRZ signal in Reconfigurable Recirculating Loop Transmission

This paper demonstrates optical 3R regeneration for a 10 Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) data format. Semiconductor optical amplifier based Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI) wavelength converters, synchronous modulator, and Fabry-Perot filter (FPF) are used for 3R regenearation including all-optical clock recovery. Recirculating loop transmission experiments compare transmission performances with different 3R regenation spacings. Transmission with the 3R regenerator shows significant performance improvement over that without 3R regeneration in terms of eye diagram, Q-factor, and transmission distance. Q-factors around 20 dB are obtained up to a transmission distance of 5000 km when the 3R regeneration spacing is 100 or 500 km.