Supercontinuum source based on an electroabsorption modulated laser for long distance DWDM transmission

Summary form only given. Dense wavelength-division multiplexed (DWDM) transmitters based on spectrum-slicing of supercontinuum (SC) light have attracted renewed interest recently. So far, all transmission experiments with SC-DWDM sources have used actively mode-locked lasers to seed the supercontinuum, raising concerns about the stability and the practicality of these systems. Picosecond seed pulses can however also be obtained from a DFB laser using a variety of techniques. In this paper, we describe for an example a 40-channel 400 Gbit/s SC-DWDM transmitter where seed pulses are obtained from an electroabsorption-modulated DFB laser (EML). We demonstrate the error-free transmission of all channels over 7 spans (544 km) of standard single-mode fiber. To our knowledge, this is the first system experiment using a mode-locked-laser-free SC-DWDM transmitter.