Abstract

Dispersion Compensating (DC) fiber has become a well known solution to upgrading standard single-mode systems for operation at 1550 nm[1,2,3]. Modules made from DC fiber can compensate for the dispersion of the standard single-mode fiber allowing higher data rate and/or, longer length operation at 1550 nm. The technical challenge has been to increase the performance of DC modules by increasing the negative dispersion and/or decreasing the attenuation. This performance is described by a figure of merit (FOM) which is determined by dividing the module dispersion by its loss (dispersion/attenuation). Recent work reported DC fiber with <−160 ps/nm-km and >300 FOM[4]. Corning's recent work significantly improves these results.

© 1996 Optical Society of America