A 40 Gb/s Integrated Balanced Optical Front End and RZ-DPSK Performance

We have designed and built an integrated balanced optical front end suitable for detecting RZDPSK transmissions when used with an external delay-interferometer. We have achieved an optically preamplified sensitivity of -35.7 dBm at a BER of 10- 9 and an OSNR of 18.3 dB in a 0.1 nm bandwidth at 40 Gb/s. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of 40 Gb/s RZ-DPSK reception with an integrated hybrid optical front end.