Recent developments in fibre technology and its application within high speed optical communications

Abstract

Recent advances in optical fibre technology, most notably in the area of microstructured fibres, high power rare-earth doped fibres, and superstructured fibre Bragg gratings offer a host of new opportunities within future high speed communication systems. Herein we review the increased range of waveguide characteristics that can now be obtained within fibre with an emphasis on both fibre nonlinearity and dispersion control, and describe the latest advances in the design and fabrication of fibre Bragg gratings for the manipulation and shaping of ultrashort pulses. We then outline how such components can be integrated into various all-optical processing devices for high speed optical communication systems focusing in particular on data retiming and OTDM add-drop multiplexing