GENERATION AND TRANSMISSION OF OPTICAL SOLITON PULSES

Various new technologies have been proposed for optical soliton commun ications as a consequence of progress in the development of erbium-dop ed optical fiber amplifiers, and excellent experimental results with o ptical soliton communications have been reported. Since transform-limi ted pulses are very important in soliton transmission, optical soliton generation technologies using mode-locked semiconductor lasers, fiber lasers, gain-switched semiconductor lasers, and electroabsorption mod ulators are described first in this paper. The realization of soliton transmissions is then discussed along with advances in technology. Sol iton transmission using dispersion allocation is shown to be more feas ible because of the large power margin and large dispersion tolerance. (C) 1997 Scripta Technica, Inc.