AN OPTICAL TECHNIQUE FOR BIT AND PACKET SYNCHRONIZATION

We have demonstrated a new synchronization technique to align the inpu ts at a fiber-optical switching node. We compensate for the delay indu ced by the slowly varying ambient temperature at the links with a temp erature tuned laser diode in combination with the dispersion of the fi ber. This scheme shows excellent linearity and negligible transmission penalty in timing jitter and pulse shape variations. The maximum bit- shift obtained experimentally was 850 ps for a fiber dispersion of 200 ps/nm, implying that bit synchronization can be obtained at bit-rates exceeding 1 Gb/s.