Clock recovery using cascaded LiNbO3 modulator

In this paper, we demonstrate clock recovery from a patterned optical-time-division-multiplexed (OTDM) return-to-zero (RZ) data stream. A cascaded LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulator is employed as an efficient optical-electrical mixer. A phase-locked-loop (PLL) is used to lock the cross-correlation component between the optical signal and a local oscillating signal. As a result, clock signal at 10GHz is extracted from the 160Gb/s optical TDM signal. The measured root-mean-square (RMS) timing jitter of the 10GHz clock signal is ~130fs.