Optical Pulse Generation Based on an Optoelectronic Oscillator With Cascaded Nonlinear Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

Abstract

This paper presents a high-repetition-rate pulse train generator incorporating an optoelectronic oscillator based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The optoelectronic oscillator is used to generate a high-stability microwave signal, by which an optical pulse train is generated using FWM effect in cascaded SOAs. The key feature of this work is that no external microwave signal source is needed for generating an optical pulse train. An optical pulse train with a repetition rate of 10 GHz and a pulsewidth of 19 ps is experimentally generated. The pulsewidth and the repetition rate can be tunable and are experimentally demonstrated.