Characterization of All-Optical Regeneration Potentials of a Bistable Semiconductor Ring Laser

All-optical pulse reamplification, reshaping (2R), and retiming (3R) using a monolithic bistable semiconductor ring laser (SRL) is demonstrated for the first time. The regeneration performance of the SRL is characterized with an all-optical settable switching threshold, achieving significant increases in the extinction ratio (ER) of the output pulse for input ER as low as 1 dB. For retiming, a rectangular retiming window generated by a clean clock signal is used to eliminate the timing jitter in the input pulse. For input pulse with peak-to-peak timing jitter as high as ~ 12% of the bit period, the timing jitter in the retimed output pulse is reduced to < 2% of the bit period. The pulsewidth of the final regenerated data can be controlled by changing the width of the retiming window. The SRL is, therefore, shown to have a "hard" digital performance in both amplitude and time domain suitable for all-optical 3R.