Multifunctional Optoelectronic Oscillator Based on Cascaded Modulators

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a multifunctional optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) mainly composed of a phase modulator (PM) in tandem with a dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DPMZM). Simultaneous operations of low-phase-noise ultra-flat optical frequency comb (OFC) generation, prescaled electrical clock (EC) recovery and error-free fourfold demultiplexing of an injected 4×25-Gb/s optical time division multiplexing differential phase shift keying (OTDM-DPSK) signal are achieved with the proposed OEO. The generated 9-tone OFC has a flatness within 0.7 dB. The timing jitters of optical and electrical clock signals are 117 fs and 112 fs, respectively.