Time-lens based optical packet pulse compression and retiming

This paper presents a new optical circuit that performs both pulse compression and frame synchronization and retiming. Our design aims at directly multiplexing several 10G Ethernet data packets (frames) to a high-speed OTDM link. This scheme is optically transparent and does not require clock recovery, resulting in a potentially very efficient solution. The scheme uses a time-lens, implemented through a sinusoidally driven optical phase modulation, combined with a linear dispersion element. As time-lenses are also used for pulse compression, we design the circuit also to perform pulse compression, as well. The overall design is: (1) Pulses are converted from NRZ to RZ; (2) pulses are synchronized, retimed and further compressed at the specially designed time-lens; and (3) with adequate optical delays, frames from different input interfaces are added, with a simple optical coupler, completing the OTDM signal generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the design by laboratory experiments.