Ashish Ahuja

Integrated tunable fiber gratings for dispersion management in high-bit rate systems

Dispersion management is becoming paramount in high-speed wavelength-division-multiplexed lightwave systems, that operate at per-channel rates of 40 Gb/s and higher. The dispersion tolerances, in these systems, are small enough that sources of dispersion variation, that are negligible in slower systems, become critically important to network performance. At these high-bit rates, active dispersion compensation modules may be required to respond dynamically to changes occurring in the network, such as variations in the per-channel power, reconfigurations of the channels path that are caused by add-drop operations, and environmental changes, such as changes in ambient temperature. We present a comprehensive discussion of an emerging tunable dispersion compensating device, based on thermally actuated fiber gratings. These per-channel devices rely on a distributed on-fiber thin film heater, deposited onto the outer surface of a fiber Bragg grating. Current flowing through the thin film generates resistive heating at rates that are governed by the thickness profile of the metal film. A chirp in the grating is obtained by using a thin-film, whose thickness varies with position along the length of the grating in a prescribed manner; the chirp rate is adjusted by varying the applied current. The paper reviews some of the basic characteristics of these devices and their implementation, in a range of different applications, including the mitigation of power penalties associated with optical power variations. We present detailed analysis of the impact of group-delay ripple and polarization-mode dispersion on systems performance, and present results from systems experiments, that demonstrate the performance of these devices at bit rates of 10, 20, 40 and 160 Gb/s. We also discuss advantages and disadvantages of this technology, and compare to other devices.

Tunable dispersion compensation in a 160-Gb/s TDM system by a voltage controlled chirped fiber Bragg grating

We demonstrate for the first time a device that enables practical dispersion management of a 160-Gb/s time-division multiplexer system (return-to-zero duty cycle: 30%). The dynamic dispersion is provided by an integrated chirp-tunable Bragg grating which is capable of recovering 2-ps pulses over a tuning range of 50 ps/nm with system power penalty less than 1.3 dB.

Characteristics of heat flow in optical fiber devices that use integrated thin-film heaters

We describe the analysis of heat flow in a type of tunable optical fiber grating that uses thin-film resistive heaters microfabricated on the surface of the fiber. The high rate of heat loss from these microstructures and the relatively low thermal diffusivity of the glass yield unusual thermal properties. Approximate one-dimensional analytical calculations capture important aspects of the thermal characteristics of these systems. Comparison with experimental results that we obtained from devices with established designs validates certain features of the computations. This modeling also establishes the suitability of integrated thin-film heaters for several new types of tunable fiber grating devices.