Dispersion compensation in an optical communications system with an electroabsorption modulated laser and a fiber grating

The robustness of an optical communications system with an electroabsorption modulated laser (EML) to dispersion mismatch is investigated, where a fiber grating is used for dispersion compensation. We use 12-nm bandwidth 1360-ps/nm dispersion fiber gratings, which were fabricated to match the dispersion of 80 km of standard fiber, and an EML transmitter in a 10-Gb/s communications system testbed. We demonstrate a maximum power penalty <2 dB over a wide range of standard fiber lengths (30-110 km).