Novel 3R regenerator based on polarization switching in a semiconductor optical amplifier-assisted fiber Sagnac interferometer

A novel 3R regeneration scheme based on polarization switching in a semiconductor optical amplifier-assisted fiber Sagnac interferometer is presented and experimentally demonstrated at 10 Gb/s. The scheme operates error-free retaining the input wavelength or as regenerative wavelength converter, and requires extremely low switching power of 2 dBm to operate. Investigation of the retiming ability of the regenerator is also reported to demonstrate full optical retiming from a signal with up to 21-ps timing jitter achieved with a penalty of 1 dB.