Abstract

As the channel bit rate in optical time division multiplexed (OTDM) transmission links of to-days networks increases beyond 40 Gbit/s, high speed signal monitoring is needed for optimization and control of the transmitted signal. At these bit rates electrical sampling oscilloscopes (resolution > 10 ps) will no longer be able to resolve optical pulses, and hence, can not be used for channel monitoring. With optical sampling techniques, employing extremely short sampling pulses, a resolution of <1 ps is achievable. We have previously reported an optical sampling system based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in highly non-linear dispersion shifted fiber able to visualize 300 Gbit/s eye-diagrams with 1.6 ps resolution.¹ The optical sampling system has proven to be a very powerful tool for real-time system opti-mization and signal analysis.² Detrimental transmission induced effects such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), third-order dispersion (TOD), po-larization-mode dispersion (PMD), and non-linear interactions can be viewed and analyzed when the pulse shapes are resolved.

© 2002 Optical Society of America