Abstract

The low loss 1.5 um wavelength region of silica fibers is of interest for future high speed (>2 GBit/s) communication systems. However, because of the substantial chromatic dispersion of the fiber, the data rate is limited. For new data links, dispersion shifted fiber (DSF) can be used, but the already installed fiber is almost entirely of the conventional type with approximately 15 ps/nmkm dispersion. Several schemes have been proposed and demonstrated to overcome the dispersion limitation. For example, pre-distortion with a phase modulator (1) and dispersion compensation by self-phase modulation in semiconductor laser amplifiers (2). The most elegant technique, however, is the use of optical solitons (3) as demonstrated by Mollenauer et al. (4). The only soliton data transmission experiment reported to date is a 2.8 Gbit/s experiment over 23 km of DSF with a total dispersion of 92 ps/nm (5).

© 1990 Optical Society of America