Abstract

For present and future long-haul, high-capacity systems operating at 10 Gb/s, 40 Gb/s or even higher bit-rates, dispersion compensation is indispensable. Transmission fibers with a finite non-zero dispersion of 4 to 20 ps/nm/km are preferred by system designers today because of nonlinear impairments primarily from four wave mixing. The accumulation of dispersion in these fibers limits the transmission distance to approximately 60 to 300 km for 10 Gb/s systems and 4 to 18 km for 40 Gb/s systems if dispersion compensation is not employed. Furthermore, demand for multi-channel, large bandwidth systems also requires compensation of the transmission fibers’ non-negligible dispersion slope in order to simultaneously compensate all channels. To achieve dispersion and dispersion slope compensation the dispersion compensating device has to match the relative dispersion slope (RDS) of the transmission fiber.¹ RDS is defined as the ratio of dispersion slope to dispersion at any given wavelength. Table 1 lists dispersion properties at 1550 nm of some common transmission fibers.

© 2002 Optical Society of America