Christopher Lin

Dynamically tunable dispersion slope compensation using a virtually imaged phased array (VIPA)

A virtually imaged phased array (VIPA) can perform dynamically tunable dispersion slope compensation. The tuning mechanism is the rotation of the diffraction grating that is used to provide wavelength separation for fixed dispersion slope compensation. The range of tunability is limited by the increase in loss due to the sub-optimal incident angle on the diffraction grating upon rotation.

Simulation and design for a tunable dispersion compensator package

A novel optical model for a tunable dispersion compensator is realized by a deliberate packaging scheme ensuing from intensive interactions of mechanical design, materials science and numerical simulation techniques including computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis. The compensator is comprised of multiple cascaded single cavity Gires-Tournois etalons, each under independent temperature control. Three critical issues are addressed: etalon temperature uniformity, thermal insulation and optical surface deformation of the etalons. With etalon optical surface deformation minimized and etalon temperature uniformity successfully controlled within a range of /spl plusmn/0.1/spl deg/C, this small (232 /spl times/ 139 /spl times/ 16 mm) compensator achieves extremely low group delay ripple (<2.0 ps), low insertion loss ripple (<0.5 dB, insertion loss <6.3 dB), low polarization dependent loss [(PDL),<0.15 dB] and low polarization mode dispersion [(PMD),<0.7 ps]. The dispersion tuning range is from -700 ps/nm to +700 ps/nm in a dispersion passband of 0.2 nm which is sufficient for 10-Gb/s transmission. Thermal insulation design makes the tuning process take effect within 1 min at maximum power consumption 5 W.

ps/nm tunable dispersion compensator using cascaded Gires-Tournois etalons

We proposed a novel tunable dispersion compensator using cascaded, thermally tunable Gires-Tournois etalons. We present results demonstrating tunability over the range +2000 ps/nm to -2000 ps/nm with a usable window of 0.2 nm at 50 GHz channel spacing.