Optical Regeneration
Optical transmissions suffer from optical impairments. Conventional approaches apply optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversion to optical signals and therefore regenerate them. Compared to the O/E/O counterpart, optical-regeneration technology can potentially work with lower power consumption and much more compact size and can provide transparency to protocol and the formats. Optical regeneration generally includes 3R: retiming, reshaping and re-amplifying. Some optical regeneration techniques are 2R, excluding retiming.
The figure below shows a burst-mode 3R regeneration technique we have demonstrated recently. It includes a SOA-MZI module for reshaping and re-amplification, and then burst-mode re-clocking using a clock recovery module, where a Fabry-Perot filter (FPF) extract out the clock component and a saturated SOA equalizes the amplitude, and a LiNbO3 modulator to carve the recovered clock onto the data payload.
Burst Mode Optical 3R Regeneration
