Mining the optical bandwidth for a terabit per second

Author

Willner, Alan Eli

Author_Institution

Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Volume

34

Issue

4

fYear

1997

fDate

4/1/1997 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

32

Lastpage

41

Abstract

A significant part of optical-fiber capacity can be tapped now that optical amplifiers can boost many high-speed channels simultaneously. The erbium-doped optical fiber amplifier opened the floodgates to wide-bandwidth, all-optical schemes for multiplexing many wavelengths. Until the advent of the erbium-doped fiber amplifier, no practical all-optical amplifier existed. Optical signals were instead regenerated electronically to overcome the attenuation inherent in the silica fiber as well as other losses due to optical components along the line

Keywords

fibre lasers; multiplexing; optical fibre communication; all-optical amplifier; erbium-doped optical fiber amplifier; high-speed channels; multiplexing; optical bandwidth; optical fiber capacity; regenerators; terabit per second; wide-bandwidth all-optical communication; Bandwidth; Broadband amplifiers; Erbium-doped fiber amplifier; High speed optical techniques; Optical amplifiers; Optical attenuators; Optical devices; Optical fiber amplifiers; Semiconductor optical amplifiers; Stimulated emission;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Spectrum, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9235

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/6.583444

Filename

583444