Ultrafast time-division demultiplexer based on electrooptic on/offgates

Electrooptic on/off gate-based demultiplexers for high-bit-rate optical transmission systems are reported. The electrooptic demultiplexing of a TDM 49.6 Gb/s fixed pattern data stream is demonstrated, using two cascaded Ti:LiNbO₃ electroabsorptive multi-quantum-well intensity modulators driven at 6.2 GHz. Error-free 10 Gb/s demultiplexing to 5 Gb/s is achieved using cascaded Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulators driven at 1.25 GHz. The power penalty due to the interchannel crosstalk is 0.3 dB at the bit error rate of 10^-9