Demonstration of timing skew compensation for bit-parallel WDM data transmission with picosecond precision

Summary form only given. Bit-parallel WDM data transmission has been proposed as one promising approach to substantially increase the data rate in parallel processing computer networks. In this technique, each bit of a byte (or word) of data is transmitted in parallel at a separate wavelength, and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is used to transmit the data bytes over a single fiber. Since the data transmission is in parallel form (parallel-by-bit, serial-by-byte), the timing skew between different bits due to the group velocity dispersion (GVD) of the fiber is a major problem. The techniques previously reported to deal with this timing skew either require high pulse energy to induce fiber nonlinearity or lack of high resynchronization accuracy (>100 psec for kilometer fiber links) due to the use of electronic processing. In this paper, we demonstrate linear timing skew compensation using a dispersion compensating fiber (DCF). We show that the DCF technique originally developed for precise dispersion equalization for the TDM systems operating in the tens of Gb/s as well as for femtosecond pulse transmission can significantly reduce the timing skew and increase the capacity for the bit-parallel WDM data transmission.