Performance improvement of optical RZ-receiver by utilizing an all-optical waveform converter

A practical receiver scheme with all-optical waveform conversion is proposed and demonstrated. To mitigate influence of the timing jitter of the received signal, the proposed receiver employs a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-based waveform converter, which can generate signal pulses with a rectangular-like profile. We have evaluated the receiver performances of the conventional and proposed schemes. The receiver sensitivity improvement of 0.7 dB and the phase-margin enlargement of 60 % were simultaneously achieved in comparison with the conventional receiver scheme.