Abstract

Many experiments have recently demonstrated the possibility of propagating pulses at line rates of 160 GB/s or above.^1–6 Most approaches rely either on supercontinuum sources operating at 40 GHz or 10 GHz semiconductor mode-locked lasers for pulse generation. Here we report on the use of a compact semiconductor mode-locked laser (MLL) for pulse generation at a repetition rate of 40 GHz. With this pulse source a back-to-back Q of 11.4 was obtained at 160 GB/s and propagation over 480 km of NDSF was demonstrated, using only EDFAs for fiber attenuation compensation. Numerical simulations show that the performance of the system is not penalised by the addition of adjacent WDM channels, and that the reach is significantly increased by using in-line distributed Raman amplification.

© 2002 Optical Society of America