Single-Polarization, Optically Pre-Amplified Receiver With Gated, Burst-Mode Clock Recovery

We report a receiver using a single-polarization optical low-noise pre-amplifier and a burst-mode, time-gated clock recovery unit (CRU). Timing jitter and bit-error-ratio (BER) measurements are presented for data rates from 72 Mb/s to 2.880 Gb/s, both with and without atmospheric fading. At the lowest burst-mode data rate of 72 Mb/s, temporal gating improves the recovered clock’s timing jitter below receive power levels of −65 dBm, enabling comm-limited performance as opposed to CRU-limited performance. Gating extends the CRU and receiver range down to −88 dBm, a 3-dB sensitivity improvement over the non-gated case. For all data rates and channels measured, jitter values remain below 9 ps (3% of the clock period) with gating enabled. The BER performance is <2.5 dB from the theoretical limit across all data rates, both with and without atmospheric fading.