Applications of electroabsorption modulators to soliton transmission

A practical approach toward long-haul multi-ten Gbit/s soliton transmission systems has been studied, focusing on novel device and transmission technologies we have developed. InGaAsP electroabsorption (EA) modulators have been applied successfully to ultrashort pulse generation and optical time-division demultiplexing for soliton transmission by employing a sinusoidal driving scheme. The multi-ten Gbit/s performances of the EA modulators in these novel applications as well as conventional NRZ data modulation are discussed. To mitigate limitations of soliton transmission due to timing jitter, simple and practical methods using alternating-amplitude solitons and relatively wideband optical band-pass filters have been proposed and experimentally evaluated. Prospects for high bit-rate single channel soliton transmission are discussed on the basis of the experimental work on 20 Gbit/s soliton transmission systems using these technologies.