光伝送信号品質評価装置に用いる低ジッタ短光パルス発生器の提案と評価

抄録

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.