Abstract

Reliable, compact, and economical transmitters are an essential component in practical optical transmission systems. Electroabsorption modulators (EAM’s) have excellent properties for pulse generation or data encoding such as small drive-voltage requirement, large extinction ratio, and polarization insensitivity and could be integrated with other semiconductor devices. The EAM-integrated DFB lasers are already widely used in short-distance NRZ transmission systems. The use of EAM’s in the long-haul (LH) or ultra-long-haul (ULH) transmission systems has been rather limited as its chirp characteristics are somewhat inferior to those of lithium niobate modulators. However, EAM’s are very attractive alternative for data modulation at high-bit-rate (>40 Gb/s) as the very high drive voltage for the high-speed lithium niobate modulators requires costly RF components.

© 2002 Optical Society of America