All-Optical Clock Recovery From NRZ-DPSK Signal

All-optical clock recovery (CR) from 20-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero differential phase-shift-keying (NRZ-DPSK) signal is demonstrated, with an all-fiber delay interferometer (DI) and a mode-locked semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) fiber laser. The tunable DI serves as an all-optical DPSK demodulator and the phase-modulated NRZ-DPSK signal is converted into the intensity-modulated pseudoreturn-to-zero (PRZ) signal, with the enhancement of the clock component. Followed SOA fiber-laser is used to achieve CR from the PRZ signal. Fixed bit pattern and 2³¹-1 pseudorandom binary sequence NRZ-DPSK signals are used to test the performance of the proposed system. It is shown that the recovered clock signal with the extinction ratio over 10 dB and the root-mean-square timing jitter of 800 fs can be achieved