L. Bickers

Transmission and signal processing techniques for gigabit lightwave systems

The technology of optical-fiber transmission systems has advanced rapidly within recent years; a number of laboratories having reported gigabit transmission over 100-km spans. These developments have placed increasing emphasis on the associated signal processing functions such as timing extraction and regeneration. This paper will review laser, fiber, and receiver requirements for high-speed systems and describe two recent lightwave transmission experiments featuring distributed feedback lasers, low-loss dispersion-shifted fiber, germanium avalanche photodiode receivers, and gallium arsenide logic devices.

Long span optical transmission experiments at 34 and 140 Mbit/s

Long-haul optical fiber transmission system experiments have been carried out over unrepeatered spans up to 250 km. In this paper the design options for such systems will be discussed, followed by a description of five laboratory trials: a dispersion-limited 176-km 34- Mbit/s experiment, employing commercial components throughout; two loss-limited system trials over 220 km at 140 Mbit/s and 233 km at 34 Mbit/s, based on multimode lasers and dispersion-shifted fiber; and a further two experiments over 223 and 251 km at the same line rates, featuring single-line DFB lasers and step-index monomode fiber.