We have proposed and demonstrated a novel optical regenerator architecture employing electroabsorption modulators as wavelength converters. The employment of EA modulators is advantageous for high-speed operation and flexibility in the bit-rate for the pulse regeneration. In addition, the EA modulator-wavelength-converter acts also as a photo diode for clock extraction. Compensation of the optical SNR and Q-factor has been demonstrated, even in cascaded noise load. Furthermore, against dispersion loading, we have confirmed that waveform recovery and Q-factor improvement is obtained by midway insertion of the optical regenerator. The proposed architecture will offer a wide-band-electronics-free optical regenerator in multi-tens of gigabit per second WDM networks.

We have proposed and demonstrated a novel optical regenerator architecture employing electroabsorption modulators as wavelength converters. The employment of EA modulators is advantageous for high-speed operation and flexibility in the bit-rate for the pulse regeneration. In addition, the EA modulator-wavelength-converter acts also as a photo diode for clock extraction. Compensation of the optical SNR and Q-factor has been demonstrated, even in cascaded noise load. Furthermore, against dispersion loading, we have confirmed that waveform recovery and Q-factor improvement is obtained by midway insertion of the optical regenerator. The proposed architecture will offer a wide-band-electronics-free optical regenerator in multi-tens of gigabit per second WDM networks.

Electroabsorption modulators are high speed devices that are rapidly being commercialised and finding applications in a number of areas, particularly in telecommunications. A CW laser diode modulated by an electroabsorption modulator constitutes an extremely stable, robust and simple source of high quality, high repetition rate ultrashort optical pulses. In this paper we describe the capabilities and limitations of such pulse sources, and present nonlinear pulse compression and manipulation techniques that allow one to overcome these limitations. We also present the design of a new class of comb-like dispersion-profiled fibre compressor. Such a compressor is easily fabricated from commercially available fibres and represents a simple yet powerful way of extending the range of pulse durations available. As the electroabsorption modulator is essentially a high speed switch it is also applicable to optical processing problems, and we report the application of such a device to demultiplexing.