A group delay in an optical fiber is one of the major factors limiting the transmission distance of a long-distance, high bit-rate optical fiber communication system using in-line erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs). The group delay can be compensated by a delay equalizer (a stripline section, for instance) inserted in the intermediate frequency stage of a coherent receiver. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method for compensating the fiber group- delay precisely by adjusting the width distribution of a nonuniform, open-type stripline compensator and thus optimizing its group-delay characteristics. It is shown that, by using the optimized nonuniform stripline, the overall group-delay dispersion is reduced to approximately 1/20 of the value obtained with an ordinary, uniform stripline compensator. The effectiveness of the optimized stripline was confirmed by a computer simulation of the entire system.

Date Published: 17 December 1992
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 1787, Multigigabit Fiber Communications, (17 December 1992); doi: 10.1117/12.139325

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1787:
Multigigabit Fiber Communications
Leonid G. Kazovsky; Karen Liu, Editor(s)