System characterization of a passive 40 Gb/s All Optical Clock Recovery ahead of the receiver

We report on a passive all-optical clock recovery technique based on data signal filtering with a Fabry-Perot filter, tested in a 40 Gb/s transmission system. We have simulated the clock recovery principle to choose the filter finesse and then investigate with experiment the method for 43 Gbit/s RZ signal clock recovery ahead of a receiver. We use Bit Error Rate assessment to demonstrate its system compatibility and to evaluate both its pattern sequence length tolerance and, for the first time, its clock locking range.