Proposal for Short Optical Pulse Generator with Low Time Jitter for Monitoring Optical Signal Quality

Abstract

An optical performance monitor (Q-monitor) based on all-optical sampling technology has been reported as an optical signal quality monitor for photonic networks. The Q-monitor measures the eye pattern of the optical transmission signal, and the signal quality is assessed by calculating the Q factor from the measured eye patterns. Here, we propose a short optical pulse generator with low time jitter as an optical sampling pulse source for the Q-monitor. It consists of an optical pulse source, a pulse compressor, and a waveform shaper. We confirmed that the pedestal-suppressed pulse was obtained using the pulse shaper, and that optimizing the pulse generator operating conditions produced a pulse width of 7.0 ps when the RMS time jitter was less than 0.5 ps. The eye pattern is clear for a 10-Gb/s NRZ signal using a Q-monitor with the short optical pulse generator. This paper explains the pulse generator principle and performance. Furthermore, we report evaluation results for the Q-monitor with pulse generator.