All-optical bit-level retiming and jitter suppression

We demonstrate a novel all-optical bit-level retiming scheme by means of dynamic wavelength conversion and dispersion compensation. A linearly chirped, temporally square pulse is generated through self-phase modulation in a highly nonlinear fibre before being sampled by the incoming data inside an optical AND gate. Dispersion compensation of the sampled chirped pulse is then used to suppress both the timing jitter and phase wander simultaneously on a bit-by-bit level. Timing jitter of up to 3 ps rms at 10 Gbit/s is compensated for as well as phase wander of more than 30 ps. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.