Clocked optical regenerator and other optoelectronic functional circuits

摘要

A diode laser amplifier used as a clocked optical regenerator and other diode laser amplifier optoelectronic functional circuits are disclosed. In the regenerator circuit (101), the input optical pulse data signal to be regenerated is inputed to a diode laser amplifier (102), the gain of which is modulated by a clock signal electronically recovered from and synchronized with the input data signal. By modulating the gain so that it is substantially attenuated during essentially half of each bit interval, and at a high gain level during the other half of the bit interval, each pulse in the input signal is both amplified and "cleaned up" produce an output pulse signal that is an amplified, reshaped and retimed version of the input optical signal. In other embodiments the modulated diode laser amplifier (102) is used as an electrooptic modulator by modulating the amplifier gain with an electrical information signal, the amplifier optic input being either a stream of unmodulated optical pulses or a CW dc light input. The modulated diode laser amplifier also functions as a channel selector in a time-division- multiplexed optical communications system in which the modulating electrical signal is used to gate to the amplifier output the input optical pulses associated only with a selected one of the multiplexed channels.