A holey fiber-based nonlinear thresholding device for optical CDMA receiver performance enhancement

Abstract

We demonstrate the use of an optical thresholder based on a short length of holey fiber to achieve enhanced code recognition quality in a 255-chip 320Gchip/s superstructured fiber Bragg grating-based optical code-division multiple access code:decode system. The nonlinear thresholder is based on bandpass filtering of spectrally broadened components generated by self-phase modulation and assisted by the Raman effect in an 8.7m length of highly nonlinear holey fiber. Error free penalty free system performance is obtained with complete recovery of the original input pulse shape