BIT-RATE AND FORMAT INSENSITIVE ALL-OPTICAL CIRCUIT FOR RESHAPING, REGENERATION AND RETIMING OF OPTICAL PULSE STREAMS

摘要

A method and system for AO3R functionality is presented. The system includes an AO2R device followed by an AOCR clock recovery module and an AOR retiming device. The AOR retiming device takes as input a recovered clock signal extracted from the output of the AO2R by the AOCR clock recovery module. The output is the recovered clock signal gated by the regenerated and reshaped input signal, and a monitor circuit is used to set the optimum operations of the retiming device. In a first embodiment the output of the AOR retiming device is fed to an AOC code and wavelength conversion output stage, which returns the signal to the NRZ coding, on a service wavelength converted to match the fixed wavelength connection with the DWDM transmission system. In a second embodiment the code conversion is incorporated into the AOR retiming device, and wavelength conversion is accomplished in the AOCR clock recovery device. Previous schemes for performing the O3R functionality use some level of Optical-to-electronic (OEO) conversion to generate the clock signal. The AO3R scheme presented here carries out all three functions in the optical domain, and returns a clean output signal using identical coding as the input, on a wavelength of choice. A lossy, component, such as an optical cross-connect switch can be placed either before the AO3R device or inside of it after the AO2R device and before the signal is split to the AOCR clock recovery and the AOR retiming devices.