Abstract

Recently, optical pulses have been generated with a sinusoidally driven electro-absorption(EA) modulator[1]. The attained pulses from bulk EA modulators, however, have insufficient duty ratio for optically time-division multiplexed(TDM) soliton transmission[2]. To reduce the duty ratio, we propose a novel transform- limited(TL) pulse generation technique using a monolithically integrated MQW- DFB-LD/MQW-EA modulator light source and a dispersion decreasing fiber(DDF) operating as an adiabatic soliton compressor[3]. The MQW-EA modulator whose extinction ratio strongly depends on applied voltage can yield smaller pulse ratio than is possible with bulk EA modulators [4]. The monolithically integrated light source has further advantage as a stable single-chip pulse generator. The adiabatically compressed pulses through the DDF, which preserve their fundamental soliton condition, are closer to TL pulses than those created by other nonlinear compression techniques[5][6]. We successfully demonstrated a 2.5 ps soliton pulse with a 0.33 time-bandwidth product and a 0.037 duty ratio at 15 GHz repetition rate.

© 1993 Optical Society of America