Abstract

The advent of erbium-doped optical fiber amplifiers which operate at 1.55 µm has triggered considerable interest in schemes that will permit the upgrade of installed systems operating at 1.31 µm to operate in the 1.55 µm window. Since installed systems use standard single mode fibers with a dispersion-zero at 1.31 µm, any upgrade scheme must incorporate a method of compensating for the positive dispersion of the standard (non-dispersion-shifted) fiber at 1.55 µm if high transmission rates are to be achieved. An equalization technique that uses two-mode fibers was suggested by Poole et al..¹ While high compensation ratios (defined as the ratio of the length of the communications fiber to the length of the compensating fiber) of 30:1 have been achieved, the higher-order mode technique requires intermodal convertors and polarization rotators, thus adding to the system cost and complexity. Dugan et al. ² and Izadpanah et al.³ demonstrated the use of single-mode fiber compensators (using the fundamental LP₀₁ mode). However, the single-mode fiber-based compensating schemes could not compensate for the second-order dispersion and absolute values of the dispersion were typically less than 100 ps/nm-km. In this paper, we present a multiclad dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) operated in the single-mode regime that has a dispersion of -212 ps/nm-km and is capable of compensating dispersion over a broad wavelength range.

© 1993 Optical Society of America